Ataccama Data Trust Report 2025: One in Five Businesses Lack a Data Governance Framework, Leaving AI Advantages Untapped

Compliance and risk mitigation are growth engines for trust, long-term value, and strategic advantage

Ataccama, the data trust company, today released the Ataccama Data Trust Report 2025: Turning Compliance and Risk Mitigation into a Foundation for Strategic AI Advantage, which highlights a disconnect between businesses’ ambitions for AI and their investment into compliance and risk mitigation. The second report in the series explores how many businesses are running before they can walk by building AI on unstable foundations made of data that isn’t governed correctly.

Also Read: AI and Big Data Governance: Challenges and Top Benefits

The report found that 42% of organizations prioritize regulatory compliance, but only 26% focus on it within their data teams. This highlights blind spots with real-world consequences like regulatory fines and data breaches that can erode customer trust, financial stability, and competitiveness. The Data Trust Report suggests that organizations must reframe their thinking to see compliance as the foundation for long-term business value and trust.

Automation is the engine of sustainable risk mitigation

Generative and traditional AI tools are only as reliable as the data they depend on. To ensure this data isn’t compromised, businesses must adopt automation for more than just improving efficiencies. Considering 47% of organizations recognize data quality as critical to compliance and 39% highlight data accuracy as essential for risk mitigation, automation within this process is vastly undervalued.

To gain access to AI-ready data, innovative companies should be embedding automation into their workflows for data validation and accuracy, scalable risk mitigation, and auditing. Without automation as the foundation for scalability, businesses risk their AI investment failing.

Leadership misalignment is the silent killer of AI success

33% of organizations cite leadership misalignment as a significant blocker for responsible AI adoption. The evolution of AI far outpaces historical transformations such as cloud adoption, creating an unprecedented urgency for strategic leadership alignment, which many businesses are lacking.

Leadership teams must act decisively and responsibly to enable their organizations to set the pace for AI adoption. This includes ensuring complete alignment to a robust governance framework across the business, which 21% of organizations lack entirely. Driving this compliance from the top down will create a cultural reset that sees governance move from a reactive checkbox to a strategic driver of innovation and trust.

Also Read: The Role of AI and Machine Learning in Streaming Technology

The growing strain of regulatory tension

Just 2% of organizations believe regulations stifle innovation, while 55% feel that current frameworks are too restrictive, showing clear tension between the optimism businesses feel towards compliance and the reality of fast-moving AI sectors. Currently, only 24% of organizations have implemented AI at scale, highlighting a significant gap in readiness.

Fortunately, automation has the potential to improve regulatory adherence by 40% this year, which businesses can augment by establishing cross-functional teams to adapt to regulatory changes in real-time, and by shifting the mindset of their teams to see compliance as an opportunity rather than a hurdle.

Mike McKee, CEO of Ataccama, said, “Ataccama is in a unique position to help companies tackle data quality as the foundation for successful AI business initiatives with our unified data trust platform that combines data quality, lineage, observability and master data management. Compliance built on high-quality, trusted data is the foundation for transparency, and it should be regarded as more than a tick-box exercise. Tackling this with a scalable solution embedded with AI-enabled automation will unlock a competitive advantage for initiatives such as customer expansion and personalized experiences. The business leaders that understand this and instill the same mindset throughout their companies will be the ones setting the pace in the future.”

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