I am honored to collaborate on this week's blog with Fran Willis White, an industry expert on the role of change leadership and employee empowerment to drive cultural transformation. In collaborating on this blog, I discovered many similarities in the role of empowerment in the data science development process to optimize business outcomes, as well as the role of empowerment of the frontline business stakeholders to reinvent those same business outcomes. AI is a generational opportunity for organizations of all types and sizes to optimize their key to grow your business and operational processes, mitigate financial, compliance and regulatory risk, uncover new revenue streams, and create a more compelling customer experience. And the potential of AI is fueled by data, which is driving the desire for organizations to become data-driven. Unfortunately, organizations are failing at becoming data-driven (see "Data and AI Leadership Executive Survey 2022" from Tom Davenport and Randy Bean).

I hate it when I hear senior executives state that they want to become data-driven, as if somehow having data is value in of itself. Now, one can hardly blame the unenlightened executive whose only perspectives on data are associated with statements like "Data is really the new oil" (Wall Street Journal) or "The world's most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data" (The Economist). The infatuation with "data-driven" versus "value-driven" can be confirmed from Google Trends (Figure 1). However, this is where the value determination of data and oil diverge. Oil has value as determined by Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).