Big Data and AI are now near-universally accepted as important pillars of business growth. They have managed to capture the attention and imagination of senior business decision-makers, grabbing a seat at the Board and C-Suite levels. It is difficult to imagine today, but there was a time a few years back when data analysts were relegated to the hidden recesses of most corporations. Before information technology (IT) emerged as a critical business function, data was considered something that firms filed away in vaults to comply with regulators and not a business asset that must be mined to unlock critical business insights. Firms perceived data as the purview of those who were sometimes derisively referred to as data geeks or "propeller heads."