Every sector in the world is currently investigating Artificial intelligence (AI). Groundbreaking advancements in AI will take place in health and life sciences, cyber-intelligence, smart cities and transportation.

But before anyone can execute an AI strategy, they’ll need a data strategy.

When we think about the vast majority of the work that data scientists do, 85 percent of that work is associated with data governance, cleansing, tagging and classification of data—all elements that are embodied in the concept of a data strategy.

Thus, harnessing the power of data with AI, requires understanding the data sets required and how relevant they are to the insight we are trying to drive.

We have to ask ourselves: Do we have enterprise data that is clean and meaningful or is it filled with gaps or deceitful data? Can we leverage the immense amount of data that’s sitting outside the enterprise, such as social media or retail data?

In many ways, our customers are still in the infancy stages associated with understanding where their data is and how impactful it can be to identify relevant, clean data. Once they do, it sets the stage for a meaningful discussion into how they can use that data to drive insights that act as a competitive advantage.

Accelerating AI with Intel and IBM

At Intel, we are moving to become a data-centric company not only because it’s part of our corporate vision, but also because our customers demand that we do so. They’re determined to find a way to use our infrastructure to accelerate their AI strategies. We are focused on ensuring that we understand how to optimize workloads and code on top of our silicon to drive the kinds of efficiencies and performance that our clients are asking us for.

Intel and IBM are great partners and closely aligned in becoming more data-centric. IBM has created IBM Cloud Pak for Data (formerly IBM Cloud Private for Data), a platform for advanced integration and interoperability of multiple datasets. Our companies are committed to ensuring that it’s optimized for Intel Xeon Scalable processors, accelerating performance for our customers.

Filling a need in the marketplace

Many of our customers struggle with hundreds of data sets that they need to identify, discover, assess, clean up and integrate. IBM Cloud Pak for Data helps with data discovery and rapid integration of enterprise-wide data, enabling business to deliver hyper-relevant experiences, services and products in the marketplace.

Intel’s participation and contribution is meaningful because customers can run the IBM Cloud Pak for Data at speed on their Intel-based infrastructure. The union between IBM and Intel is supercharging the ability of data scientists to drive better insight and better business outcomes in a way that has never been seen before.

Modernize how you turn data into insights with a multicloud data and AI platform, check out ibm.biz/icp4data.

Intel’s Melvin Greer is the founder of a nonprofit called the Greer Institute for Leadership and Innovation, whose primary focus is to ensure that these underserved populations actively participate in the design and development of AI solutions.