Data Is Drifting Away from the Business

We live in an age where data is growing at an exponential rate. New systems, more tracking, finer-grained instrumentation. Today’s businesses are generating petabytes of signals across every part of their operation. Every click, scroll, pause, purchase, skip, cancelation, or upgrade creates a data point. And every one of those is stored, analyzed, and modeled by increasingly powerful and complex systems.

Layer on AI and machine learning, and you’ve got unprecedented analytical firepower. These tools can now generate insights that would’ve taken teams of analysts weeks to uncover, if they ever would’ve found them at all.

Predictive models, pattern detection, anomaly alerts, they’re all part of the modern analytics toolkit.

But in all this sophistication, something important is getting lost: connection to the business.

The data is moving further and further away from reality. Not because the numbers are wrong, but because they’re detached. We dive so deep into narrow veins of insight that we lose sight of the broader picture. We optimize a form field, but forget to ask: what is the actual customer trying to do? We cluster behaviors and segment users, but fail to step back and say: what’s really happening in our business?

We’ve built immense towers of insight, but no ground floor.

What’s missing is a shared baseline understanding of the business. A bird’s eye view. A map. Something simple and foundational that everyone, from execs to engineers, can see and say, “That’s what’s going on.”

What are our customers doing?
What are they buying?
How are they using the product?
Where are they getting stuck?

These aren’t advanced questions. But they are essential. And far too often, they’re overlooked in the pursuit of more advanced analytics.

We need to bridge back from complexity to clarity.

This doesn’t mean we give up on sophisticated analytics or stop using AI. It means we ground it all in a shared reality, one that reflects what’s actually happening in the business. We can’t afford to keep building models on top of models without stepping back to ask: do we understand the full picture?

The future of data isn’t just about being smarter. It’s about being clearer. And that starts by bringing data back to the business.