Why AI Fails Without Clean Data | Ep. 20 with Doug Saunders (Sara Lee)

🎙️ Why AI Fails Without Clean DataDoug Saunders has spent 28 years running technology in the businesses nobody posts about: waste, ice, coal, cold chain logistics, and now frozen cheesecake. He is CTO at Sara Lee Frozen Bakery, and his position on AI is refreshingly unpopular. You do not throw AI at a business for the sake of it. You find the business problem, you fix the data underneath it, and only then does the technology earn its budget.In this conversation with Dave Goyal, Doug walks through what that actually looked like in production, including a distribution problem solved with LiDAR sensors and predictive routing that took twenty to thirty million dollars of cost out of an ice company, and a customer service bot that absorbed 500,000 interactions a year.In this episode:00:59 A master's in Russian history, then golf course design, then CTO04:09 Walking into food manufacturing and finding the silos07:03 Why data has to come before AI08:49 Building a $180M company off QuickBooks10:25 Your LLM has no idea what your data means14:44 Don't throw AI at a business for business sake16:20 The ice box problem that saved $30 million21:30 Automating 500,000 customer interactions a year23:56 Automating to get rid of people is the wrong approach32:51 Trust versus governance, and the Excel experts who resist36:20 The end of Excel jockeying39:21 Fitting master data governance to your cultureIf you are being asked to "do something with AI" before your data is ready, this one will give you the language to push back. Subscribe, and tell me in the comments what your organization automated too early.🔗 Links & ResourcesDoug Saunders on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dgsaundersDoug Saunders on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@SaundersdgSara Lee Frozen Bakery: https://saraleefrozenbakery.com/#DataStrategy #AIinManufacturing #SupplyChain #CTO #PrivateEquity