Unlocking the Power of Your Data. Why a Data Warehouse or Lakehouse is Essential for AI and Automation in Asset Management 🤖 💻
- Jill Singleton
- Oct 10
- 5 min read
Data has become the fuel that powers innovation, automation, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). As Microsoft and others have emphasised, the organisations that will extract the most value from AI are those that have invested in preparing, staging, and organising their data.
Without a strong foundation, AI projects often fail to deliver value, leading to wasted investment and what is sometimes referred to as the ‘trough of disillusionment’.
Welcome to the Iamdata Solutions Asset Management Newsletter - October 2025 (2 of 2) Edition
This blog post is 2 of 2 in a fortnightly. Check out 1 of 2 here, if you missed it: ➡️How Automation & AI is Advancing Asset Management for Local Governments
In today's post, I would like to discuss why building a modern data warehouse / data lakehouse, is a strategic necessity for your organisations and how it can deliver both immediate and long-term benefits across analytics, reporting, and AI enablement.
Current Challenges with Data and AI Readiness
I’ve had many conversations with clients that have highlighted several barriers that prevented them from realising the full potential of AI and data. One of the most significant challenges is the persistence of fragmented systems and data silos, where valuable information remains locked away in asset management systems project and resource planning, finance, operations, or customer request systems without a central platform to unify it. Another issue is that AI requires well-prepared, accessible, and high-quality data. When organisations fail to provide this, the outcomes of AI projects are unreliable or disappointing.
At the same time, many organisations underutilise their existing data assets, focusing only on traditional dashboards or simple reports, and overlooking the broader insights their data could offer.
Skills and technology gaps also play a role, as many organisations lack both the internal expertise and the modern platforms necessary to establish the right data foundation. These challenges often result in reduced returns on AI initiatives and missed opportunities to unlock greater business value.
Why a Data Warehouse or Lakehouse is Essential
A modern data warehouse, often referred to as a lakehouse, provides the foundation needed to overcome these challenges. By consolidating data from across the organisation into one central and governed location, it eliminates silos and enables greater visibility.
Unlike older approaches, the data warehouse / lakehouse is designed to support all types of data, including structured formats such as transactions and tables as well as unstructured data such as customer reviews, documents, images, and videos. This flexibility ensures that the organisation can continue to evolve as data sources and business needs change.
Crucially, a data warehouse / lakehouse positions data for AI and advanced analytics. It preserves raw data for data scientists while also enabling structured, cleansed layers for business analysts and decision-makers. This dual capability ensures that both operational reporting and experimental AI models can draw from the same trusted platform. Cloud-based or serverless architectures also make the solution highly scalable and easier to maintain, reducing the burden on IT teams. The result is a platform that supports everything from self-service reporting to predictive analytics and generative AI.
Strategic Benefits to the Organisation
The benefits of building a data warehouse / lakehouse can be seen in both the short and long term. In the immediate future benefits means the organisation will gain faster and more reliable reporting, improved access to data across departments, and a reduction in duplicated or manual effort.
Over the medium term, the data warehouse / lakehouse will support more accurate financial planning and forecasting, improved customer insights, and stronger governance by establishing a single source of truth for decision-making.
Looking to the future, the most significant benefit is AI readiness. With a strong data foundation in place, the organisation will be able to train and deploy machine learning models and generative AI solutions effectively, rather than wasting time and resources on pilots that fail due to poor data quality. A robust data platform also creates a competitive advantage, allowing us to use data strategically to innovate, respond to emerging technologies, and adapt to new business models.
Lessons from the AI ‘Trough of Disillusionment’
Many organisations are pulling back from AI pilots because they are not seeing the expected returns. However, this is not a sign that AI itself lacks value. Rather, it demonstrates that without the right data foundation, even the most advanced AI tools cannot deliver meaningful outcomes.
When an organisation invests in a data warehouse / lakehouse, it can avoid these pitfalls and place itself on the path to the ‘plateau of productivity’, the phase in which AI delivers sustainable and transformative benefits.
Learning from the missteps of early adopters, we have an opportunity to prepare more deliberately, ensuring that when we do invest in AI, it generates clear and lasting value.
Recommendations
To realise these benefits, organisations should commit to building a modern data warehouse / lakehouse on a platform that is scalable, flexible, and capable of handling both structured and unstructured data.
Alongside this, we need to establish governance processes to ensure data quality, consistency, and accessibility. While preparing for AI is an important outcome, the data warehouse should also be leveraged for other high-value uses such as financial reporting, operational dashboards, and customer analysis, which will deliver immediate returns.
Finally, it is important to build capability within the organisation, whether through upskilling internal teams or engaging external expertise, so that the investment is supported by the right skills and knowledge.
What Do We Know - Recap
I guess I have learnt the hard way. If I'd known then what I know now, I could have saved myself a lot of hard work. It is my experience that building a data warehouse is not simply an IT exercise, it is a strategic enabler for the entire organisation. It strengthens our ability to make informed decisions, improves efficiency, and lays the groundwork for adopting AI and other advanced technologies.
Please reach out if you would like some help building your data warehouse or data lakehouse, jill.singleton@iamdata.solutions. I would love to help you achieve your goals!
I have worked on many different projects with my Local Government clients, from designing and developing Power BI Reports, to building SQL Server databases for spatial data, to managing and maintaining GIS and the Asset Management systems. If you'd like to discuss how we might work together, then please email Jill at ➡️ jill.singleton@iamdata.solutions
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