Head of Data & AI: Reversing the Flow of Intelligence
Forward-thinking organisations are unifying Data and AI, and many are backing it with a new leadership role: Head of Data & AI.
It’s a smart move, because here’s the reality:
At this stage of the AI revolution, your AI strategy IS your data strategy.
You can’t deliver meaningful AI that impacts the bottom line without first fixing the data. And that’s not just about quality or governance - it’s also about structure.
Here’s the trick: we need to reverse the polarity of the flow of intelligence.
For the past decade, AI has extracted knowledge from external data.
Humanity poured its collective intelligence onto the web, linked it with URLs, and transformer models compressed it into model weights.
The intelligence flowed OUT of the data - and INTO the AI.
Now, the opportunity is to point that intelligence back inward.
Your organisation already holds vast reserves of valuable knowledge - buried in files, databases, documents, and systems. But it’s fragmented, siloed, and disconnected.
AI can’t reason over it holistically, because it isn’t yet structured or connected in a way machines can truly understand. Put simply: it’s not organised very intelligently.
The next move? Don’t just use foundational models to answer questions - use them to restructure your data estate.
To link it. Shape it. Make it machine-comprehensible.
To draw intelligence OUT of the models - and INTO the data itself.
If you're wondering where to begin, then - as The Knowledge Graph Guy - here’s my advice:
🔵 Use URLs to give key entities stable, connectable identities (you can link all your data together using this mechanism while leaving it exactly where it is).
🔵 Use an ontology to define meaning and capture domain knowledge (take the tribal knowledge, formalise it, and connect it back to your data).
🔵 In summary, use the AI we have today to help construct an organisational Knowledge Graph (the foundation for the reasoning and retrieval you'll need for the AI that's coming next)
If you want to build AI that truly understands your business, you first need data that reflects how your business actually thinks.
Start there - and everything else gets easier!
⭕ What Is An Ontology: https://www.knowledge-graph-guys.com/blog/what-is-an-ontology
⭕ What Is A Knowledge Graph: https://www.knowledge-graph-guys.com/blog/what-is-a-knowledge-graph
⭕ The AI Iceberg: https://www.knowledge-graph-guys.com/blog/the-ai-iceberg
