I sat down with Kristy to understand how data functions as a business asset and is the foundation of a successful AI strategy. A key point from our conversation is that becoming data-driven is as much about clean, unified data as it is about deep business context and ownership. Platforms like Kraken and Databricks solve what Kristy calls the foundational unification problem, the prerequisite that makes everything else viable. But once that foundation is in place, the part most leaders underestimate is the business context that makes unified data usable.

Aly McGue: In your experience, why do siloed data and fragmented systems remain a big hurdle for organizations trying to extract value from their investments?

Kristy Mayer-Mejia: What we see repeatedly with our clients is that low-quality, siloed data is the single biggest blocker to getting value from any other investment. Until the data is in one place, nothing else works at scale, and solving that is exactly the problem Kraken’s platform is designed to address. And I've lived this as a data leader in all my prior roles, too. Your team spends 80% of their time cleaning data, and that's just not valuable work. It's not necessary.

The real unlock is self-service, but it’s only possible once the underlying data is clean, unified, and accessible. Especially in the age of AI, self-service is possible at scale. You're never going to move quickly as a business, innovate or make day-to-day data-driven decisions if every question has to be answered by the data team. But when the data is scattered across systems with no documentation and no clear way to join it, self-service is impossible. Unification is this foundational unlock that makes everything else viable: the analytics, the AI, the speed of decision-making. It's table stakes.