Is Your Data Ready For AI?

Jan 22, 2025 | Data Cleansing, GDPR, JetStream

A 2025 survey of data, BI and analytics trends across 1,795 business technology leaders has been released, and whilst there are some surprises in the placement of some of the trending topics, the top four are wholly what you’d expect given the emergence of AI over the last year or so.

On a rating of 0 (not important at all) to 10 (very important), tech leaders were presented with and asked to rate twenty different technology trends that they’d be, at some point, asked by their businesses to consider.

The Trends

In alphabetical order, these trends were: –

Advanced analytics/ML/AI

Cloud for data & analytics

Data & AI literacy

Data catalogs & data intelligence platf.

Data governance

Data lakehouse

Data mesh

Data Ops & Observability

Data prep. by business users

Data products

Data quality mgmt.

Data security & privacy

Data warehouse modernization

Data-driven culture

Decision intelligence

Embedded BI & analytics

Generative AI for data & analytics

Integr. platforms for PM & analytics

Real-time analytics & streaming

Self-service analytics & Data disc.

So, what were the top trends?

‘Unsurprisingly, data security & privacy came in top, with data quality management second, data-driven culture third, and data governance in fourth.

An important placement in the trends list for me to mention is data & AI literacy coming in at fifth.

What does this tell us?

Despite being listed in fifth place, AI is without question the hottest topic in tech all over the world right now, but most business don’t know how to implement it. Questions arise like ‘what’s it going to do for us? How best do we utilise it? If we don’t deploy it quickly, will we lost ground to our competitors that do?’.

These are all valid questions, but one thing has to be considered before you can effectively use AI:

How good is our data?

Why are the top four in the survey the top four?

Because each of them is vitally important to ensuring that you get the right output from anything AI related.

The adage is of course “you put rubbish in, you get rubbish out”.

One of the main pillars of AI is Large Language Models (LLM), which is designed to understand and generate human-like text responses based on vast amounts of data.

So, if your data isn’t accurate, you’re setting yourself up for a fall off the bat. You’ll be inundated with swathes of information generated, some of which is used to make business critical decisions, and it may very well be the rubbish we just spoke about.

The Top Four

Looking at the top four trends, let’s quickly summarise why they’re considered the most important for these tech leaders.

Data Security and Privacy

In the context of AI, this is one of the most important elements. When I start feeding these machine learning models with our business data, who’s going to see it? A robust security and privacy policy needs to be implemented to ensure that data remains safe and secure.

Data Quality Management

Data quality is crucial for AI because high-quality data ensures the accuracy, reliability, and effectiveness of AI models. Poor data quality can lead to biased, incorrect, or unreliable outcomes, which can negatively impact decision-making and trust in AI systems. Essentially, the better the data, the better the AI’s performance and results.

Data-Driven Culture

Put simply, everyone needs to be on the bus for AI to work. If you have an Operations department that are putting up a fight in adopting a data-driven culture, they may be lapse in conforming to the rest of the business’ policies of correct data entry, which ultimately skews the results of these AI models.

Data Governance

This is the framework of policies and procedures that ensures data is managed effectively, remains high-quality, secure, and compliant with regulations. Everything from making sure the data is accurate, to tracking its lineage, to complying with GDPR policies of data handling.

With each of these trends set out, we can now see why they are paramount for businesses, especially through an AI lens.

How JetStream can help

JetStream is our first-party data cleanroom, which cleans, enhances, and appends useful third-party information to B2C businesses customer data.

And it speaks to each of the four top trends specifically.

From a data security and privacy standpoint, JetStream uses pseudonymous match keys, meaning that no one outside of your business sees the underlying data. No more sending enormous data files to bureaus once a month to make sure it’s up to date (which JetStream does in near real-time at millions of records processed per minute).

Data Quality is ensured in exactly the same way. If you have deceased customers on your database, JetStream notifies you and flags them immediately, and it does the same for customers who have moved home.

Data Governance is ensured by standardising your customer data and filling in the gaps, ensuring that an AI model isn’t going to misinterpret free text information that is held in your records. This is also a safety net on the Data-Driven Culture aspect as well. If you have customer data that isn’t being captured across the business in a uniformed fashion, JetStream fixes it virtually instantly and brings it in line with your preferred formats.

In Summary

Make sure your data is good before you trust what AI is telling you. It’s as simple as that.

AI is becoming more and more accessible to every business, not just the global enterprises, so get your data ducks in a row before you embark on your AI journey.

Speak to us about how JetStream can get you ready.

By Steve Clarke – Commercial Director at The Ark

Get in touch with The Ark

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Breaking Down Data Silos: Achieving a Single Customer View with JetStream

Nov 27, 2024 | Data Cleansing, GDPR, JetStream, SCV

Organisational constraints such as siloed data and technology continue to hinder senior marketers.

This is according to a recent report by Merkle (part of Dentsu’s annual CMO Navigator Report), which found that two-thirds of CMOs admit their companies still struggle with orchestration across marketing, media, and customer experience. This challenge persists despite the vast opportunities presented by new technologies like artificial intelligence.

The report, which surveyed over 1,900 CMOs across 13 countries, highlights a critical issue: while CMOs are eager to leverage new digital capabilities and emerging customer behaviours, they often feel unsteady about their organisation’s digital maturity. Instead of overhauling their tech stacks, many CMOs are focusing on extracting more value from existing capabilities and making highly targeted investments in technology, partners, and growth strategies.

“More than half of the CMOs are looking to new strategies to navigate forward, with a growing trend of prioritising customer experience (CX)”

Only a quarter of CMOs are heavily investing in digital transformation efforts, indicating a significant need for technologies that maximise data utilisation. More than half of the CMOs are looking to new strategies to navigate forward, with a growing trend of prioritising customer experience (CX). As they transform existing processes and data, CMOs remain optimistic about the future, with an overwhelming majority expecting marketing budget increases to support further AI adoption and more impactful customer experiences.

This is where JetStream, a revolutionary solution from The Ark, comes into play. JetStream is a cloud-based data matching platform designed to break down these silos and enhance customer experience by creating a Single Customer View (SCV).

Here’s how JetStream addresses the key challenges faced by CMOs:

Single Customer View

JetStream standardises and anonymises different customer data sets within the same organisation’s ecosystem. By consolidating disparate data sources into a unified view, JetStream ensures that all customer interactions and data points are accurately matched and integrated. This comprehensive view allows CMOs to understand their customers better and tailor their marketing strategies accordingly.

GDPR Compliance

JetStream operates within a ‘Data Clean Rooms’ environment, where sensitive data derived from unique identifiers, such as emails and names, can be leveraged while preserving privacy. This allows customer data to be matched without exposing any personally identifiable information (PII), ensuring compliance with GDPR and other data protection regulations. This secure approach builds customer trust and maintains data integrity.

Highly Accurate Data Matching

JetStream simplifies the complexities of matching customer names and addresses to third-party data sets. It deals with poorly formatted data and varying levels of data accuracy and completeness, providing a consistent and highly accurate match every time. This ensures that CMOs can trust the data they are working with, leading to more effective marketing strategies and customer interactions.

Proactive Alerts

JetStream provides near real-time alerts as changes occur within your customer data. This proactive approach allows CMOs to act fast and anticipate customer needs, enhancing the overall customer experience and enabling more timely and relevant marketing efforts.

Super-Fast Processing

With JetStream, there’s no need for monthly batch processing. The platform offers near real-time processing and matching, eliminating the need to export and transfer customer data every month. This speed and efficiency enable CMOs to stay agile and responsive in a rapidly changing digital landscape.

By leveraging JetStream, organisations can overcome the barriers of siloed data and technology, enabling a more cohesive and effective customer experience strategy. As CMOs continue to navigate the complexities of digital transformation, tools like JetStream provide the necessary insights and capabilities to drive meaningful engagement and growth.

by Steve Clarke – Commercial Director at The Ark

Want to know more about breaking down data silos?

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The Power of Identity Resolution

Oct 29, 2024 | Data Cleansing, GDPR

The Power of Identity Resolution: Ensuring Accurate Customer Data Matching

In the day in age where organisations are striving to be as data-driven as possible, businesses are constantly seeking ways to better understand and engage with their customers. One of the most effective tools in achieving this is identity resolution. This process not only helps in creating accurate customer profiles but also enhances marketing strategies, customer experiences, and regulatory compliance. Let’s dive into why identity resolution is crucial and how it works.

What is Identity Resolution?

Identity resolution is the process of creating a unified and accurate customer profile by linking data from various touchpoints and systems. This involves integrating information from emails, social media, offline interactions, and more to form a comprehensive view of each customer.

Why is Identity Resolution Important?

Accurate Customer Profiles

360-Degree View: Identity resolution helps businesses create a 360-degree view of their customers. By integrating data from multiple sources, companies can gain a holistic understanding of customer behaviours and preferences.
Personalisation: With accurate profiles, businesses can tailor their marketing strategies to individual customers, leading to improved engagement and satisfaction.

Improved Marketing Strategies

Targeting and Segmentation: Identity resolution allows for better audience segmentation and more precise targeting. This means marketing campaigns can be more effective and yield higher returns.
Cross-Channel Consistency: Maintaining a consistent message across various channels is crucial. Identity resolution ensures that customers receive a seamless and coherent experience, regardless of the platform.

Enhanced Customer Experience

Seamless Interactions: Customers expect a seamless experience across different touchpoints. Identity resolution ensures that interactions are smooth and consistent, enhancing the overall customer journey.
Predictive Analytics: By leveraging accurate customer data, businesses can use predictive analytics to anticipate customer needs and behaviours, further improving the customer experience.

Regulatory Compliance and Security

Data Privacy: With increasing data protection regulations, relying on first-party data through identity resolution helps ensure compliance and protects customer privacy.
Security Measures: A centralised and accurate customer data system enhances security, reducing the risk of data breaches and ensuring that customer information is safeguarded.

How Does Identity Resolution Work?

Deterministic vs. Probabilistic Matching

Deterministic Matching: This method uses exact data points, such as email addresses or phone numbers, to link customer data. It is highly accurate but requires precise and consistent information, which is often not available.
Probabilistic Matching: This approach uses statistical algorithms to link data based on probabilities. It can connect data points even when exact matches are not available, which is more often the case. A good algorithm will recognise different ways the same name or address can be presented enabling matches to be established, even when there are significant differences in the input data for the same individual.

Identity Resolution and Matching within Data Cleanrooms: A New Era of Privacy and Precision

In today’s data-driven world, businesses are constantly seeking ways to leverage customer data to enhance their marketing strategies and improve customer experiences. However, with increasing concerns about privacy and data security, traditional methods of data sharing and analysis are becoming less viable. This is where data cleanrooms come into play.

What are Data Cleanrooms?

Data cleanrooms are secure environments where data can be matched and analysed without exposing the underlying raw PII. These environments ensure that sensitive information remains protected while still allowing for secure matching. Data cleanrooms use advanced encryption and privacy-preserving technologies to maintain data confidentiality.

Benefits of Identity Matching within Data Cleanrooms

Enhanced Privacy: By anonymising data and using secure environments, data cleanrooms ensure that privacy is maintained throughout the analysis process.

Better and More Precise Matching: Many organisations face challenges when matching their customer data to other datasets (whether that be other customer data or external third-party sources). Inconsistently formatted data, missing data and other data related issues can be overcome through employing identity matching solutions, enabling an organisation to match their customer data with confidence, leading to better data-driven outcomes.

Compliance: Data cleanrooms help businesses comply with data protection regulations like GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 by ensuring that data minimisation is built into their data matching solutions and sensitive information is handled securely.

Conclusion

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, the importance of identity resolution will only grow and as privacy concerns continue to increase, data cleanrooms and identity matching offer a robust solution for businesses looking to leverage customer data responsibly.

By combining advanced privacy-preserving technologies with sophisticated matching algorithms (such as our own JetStream solution), businesses can ensure accurate customer data matching, leading to better marketing strategies, enhanced customer experiences, and robust regulatory compliance, while maintaining the highest standards of data security.

By Martin Jaggard – Director at The Ark

Talk to us today about how identity resolution can help your business

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Big Data LDN 2024 – The Important Bits

Sep 25, 2024 | Data Cleansing, GDPR

On Wednesday last week I visited Big Data London at London Olympia, and I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about some of the important bits that I took away from it.

I ended up getting to five of the talks throughout the day, with some really great speakers and a lot of great insight shared. I really do love an event like this – both to exhibit and attend – and there aren’t too many that top Big Data LDN in our line of work.

Firstly:

Data Governance

This was everywhere throughout the show. Now data governance isn’t new, by any stretch, and getting your ducks in a row when it comes to integrity and compliance has been a focal point for virtually every organisation for a long time, but unless your company truly is a data driven organisation, you did data governance because you had to, not least of all from a regulatory standpoint.

But now that every person and their dog want to be using AI, you must get it right. We all know the old adage “put rubbish in, get rubbish out”, but it’s never been as true as it is today. You simply will not get the best out of any internally deployed LLM if your data governance isn’t up to scratch.

Golden Records

Next it’s golden records – a single source of truth.

We, as a company, work with some of the biggest names in retail, and if you think of a company that has multiple brands under their banner, most of the time there will be disparate customer data sets in various data silos across the place, likely with slightly different formats of home address or phone numbers with international codes or without them, so it can be really tricky to get a view of information like shopping history of a single person, when it’s very hard to match them as records.

The message was, if you want to be getting full value out of your data, and again we’re talking about AI – possibly for analytics – you need a single source of truth to leverage, and when we’re looking at consumer data, golden records are a good place to start.

The final spot on my list is:

Anonymisation and Pseudonymisation

For those that aren’t overly au fair with these terms, anonymisation is the removal of personal identifiers from your customer data, and pseudonymisation is the process of replacing identifying information with random codes of numbers, symbols and codes.

Both of these were cited by the European Privacy Officer of Acxion as key safeguards when making sure compliance is adhered with not only with existing standards like GDPR, but also the New Digital Information and Smart Data Bill which is one of the 40 legislative plans announced by the Labour government in the last few months.

Just as a slight aside, if you’d like to know more about our methods of pseudonymisation, take a look at our JetStream page.

So, to recap: -

Data Governance – if you want to use AI effectively, get it right
Golden records – get your single source of truth sorted, again for AI’s sake
Anonymisation and Pseudonymisation – make sure your consumer data is protected, especially when considering new legislation

By Steve Clarke – Commercial Director at The Ark

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The Ark passes rigorous independent data compliance audit by the DMA

Jun 30, 2021 | Comment, Data Cleansing, Deceased Identification, GDPR, Goneaway Identification, Identity Fraud, National Deceased Register, Re-mover

Martin Jaggard, Managing Director of The Ark

Oxfordshire-based data specialist – The Ark – has been accredited after passing the Data & Marketing Association (DMA) rigorous and thorough compliance audit process. Membership of the DMA is an endorsement that The Ark is a dedicated and responsible marketer.

The Ark – which was created in 2003 – is the market-leader in helping companies of all sizes combat identity fraud and ensuring that they comply with legal regulations including GDPR. Its services include the National Deceased Register (NDR) – the country’s most accurate and reliable deceased identification file and Re-mover Goneways – which captures over 90% of all movers in the UK.

All DMA members are subjected to a lengthy and evidence-driven process before receiving accreditation. In the case of The Ark, it looked for evidence of its understanding of GDPR and how it was applied to the creation of identification files. It also focussed on the due diligence The Ark undertook for each data source it uses. All data companies offering PII data have to undergo this audit once every 3 years. The DMA comprises the Data and Marketing Association and the Institute of Data & Marketing (IDM) and represents over 1,000 members across the UK’s data and marketing landscape.

“The updated compliance process ensures that DMA Members continue to work to the highest standards, and that Membership remains a badge of accreditation that can be trusted in a data-driven world” commented DMA Managing Director, Rachel Aldighieri.

The Ark Managing Director, Martin Jaggard is delighted to be recognised by the DMA “Identity fraud is the UK’s fastest growing crime and with our existing products and those in development, we are in pole position to help our clients combat the threat. We are pleased that the DMA has recognised The Ark as dedicated, responsible marketers. We have worked through the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure that our clients have received faultless service and look forward to their, and indeed our continued success for the rest of this year and into the next”.

Is poor data sabotaging your campaign performance?

Sep 21, 2017 | Data Cleansing, Deceased Identification, GDPR, Goneaway Identification

Complacency when it comes to data suppression could be sabotaging your campaign performance and may also derail your GDPR compliance plans.

That’s the reality facing even those marketers who already use deceased and gone-away suppression services but who do not regularly evaluate their providers and put the health of their databases to the test.

Holding out-of-date records (whether knowingly or not) is a clear infringement of several key areas of GDPR, not least the basic principle of data accuracy. What’s more, you need to demonstrate compliance – and that means being able to prove the effectiveness of your suppression solution.

So what are the starting points to creating a watertight suppression strategy?

Guard against inertia

Despite the widely adopted practice of supplier switching in the consumer arena to reduce costs or improve services, there is often much resistance within businesses. This may be because the decision-makers are also responsible for implementation and it is simply easier to stick with the status quo rather than tinker with something that is deemed to be working. Sometimes there is also the perception that change would cause unnecessary upheaval to the wider IT systems in which suppression is embedded.

Whatever the reason, relying on outdated legacy suppression files will certainly result in deceased and goneaway data slipping through the net.

Your chosen suppression files should be evaluated regularly to make sure they are doing their job – reducing campaign wastage, providing the building blocks for advanced data insight and keeping you compliant.

Be rigorous in supplier management

In our experience, much of the procurement decision-making in suppression is still reliant on human judgement rather than an objective data evaluation. But GDPR (and the threat of large fines) is likely to change this.

Each organisation needs to have a structured approach to supplier evaluation, selection and review. This should be underpinned by clearly defined criteria and well communicated processes, so that you can make evidence-based decisions that will stand up to scrutiny. Indeed the evaluation in itself would provide valuable supporting evidence to the ICO that you are taking proactive steps to keep your databases as clean and compliant as possible.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket

Every supplier of suppression data should be included in your evaluation. This is because relying on a single file rarely identifies all known deceased, and it is simply wrong to claim otherwise. Although there is a degree of overlap, each file is created from different data sources and you need to understand how they vary in terms of data provenance, verification method, speed to market and proportion of unique records.

Take the example of one of the country’s largest general and life insurers. They recently evaluated our flagship product, the National Deceased Register (NDR), and found 89,000 deceased customers that had gone undetected by the two deceased suppression files they had been relying on for decades. This clearly illustrates the risks of relying on legacy suppression files without evaluating newer entrants in the market.

Plus, suppression services are evolving with new, innovative products coming on to market so keeping on top of the latest developments will ensure you remain ahead in data strategy.

Beware ‘biggest is best’ claims

One of the most misleading selling points from data suppliers is file size. We are proud to say that a recent independent evaluation of the main files on the market revealed the NDR as having the highest proportion of unique records despite being the smallest file.

So why does file size vary so dramatically? Some include records that date back to the mid-1980s, whereas we have chosen only to include deaths notified from the turn of the century. It is our view that older data is redundant because any organisation that has licensed suppression files in the past will already have flagged or deleted these customers. Also, some files are inflated by the inclusion of individuals who are thought to have died but where further verification is necessary. We stringently check our data and filter out those that remain unconfirmed.