Stop selling data governance as foundational work. Sell what it pays back.
"Data work doesn't deliver value. It just slows us down."
That one belief kills more data programs than any budget cut. And it's costing the executives who hold it millions.
Every CFO hears "build the foundation first" as "spend six months on plumbing before I see a dollar." So they skip it. They point an agent at messy data and demand results this quarter.
Here's the bill for skipping. MIT found 95% of enterprise GenAI pilots deliver zero return. It's not the model that fails. It's the data underneath it. Informatica's 2025 CDO survey ranks data readiness as the number one obstacle to AI. And companies that walked away from an AI initiative last year ate $7.2M in sunk cost on average.
So the slowdown executives fear is already here. It's hitting the projects that skipped context.
The fix is a 30-day domain build a CFO can read on one page
It isn't a bigger governance program. It's three numbers, off one domain, in one quarter.
One recovered dollar. The agent finds the duplicate customers inflating churn, or the revenue misclassified so badly nobody trusted the report. Name the figure. The 30-day validation is what makes it a number your CFO will bank.
One avoided incident. The bad join that would have shipped a wrong number to the board. Catch it, log it, price what it would have cost.
One unblocked decision. AI automates the paperwork. It doesn't make the call a leader's been dodging. But once the data is trusted, the pricing decision that stalled for a quarter finally moves.
A CFO doesn't fund "governance." A CFO funds a recovered number, a fire that didn't start, and a decision that ships. Deliver all three off one domain, and context stops being a cost center. It becomes the reason the next domain gets funded.
Stop selling the foundation. Sell what it pays back.
So here's the challenge: what's the first number you'd go after? Tell me your domain and your focus, and I'll share mine. The more real examples we put on the table, the better all of us get at making this case to a CFO. #30DayDataBuild
Running a build, testing this on a real domain, or think I'm wrong? Tell me. I read everything.