What 1,700 chief data officers are saying about data and AI

According to new research from IBM’s Institute for Business Value (IBV), chief data officers now face a clear mandate: use enterprise data to power AI and drive measurable business results—or get left behind.

IBV’s 2025 Chief Data Officer Study, which surveyed 1,700 CDOs globally, reveals a stark reality: while 81% said their organization’s data strategy is part of their technology roadmap—up from just 52% in 2023—only 26% were confident that their data capabilities are ready to support new AI-enabled revenue streams.

Most CDOs cited data silos as a challenge, with 83% saying they hinder innovation and impede their organization’s ability to conduct real-time analytics and make decisions, according to Haynes Cooney, Research Director of Thought Leadership at IBV and one of the study’s co-authors. “Many organizations originally built secure data silos for very legitimate reasons, including regulatory and functional purposes,” he said in an interview with IBM Think. “The good news is that modern data architectures enable real-time data access, management and governance without the need to move it.” 

78% of CDOs said they believed that leveraging proprietary data would help their organization stand out in the market. But possessing valuable data and actually extracting value from it are two different things. “It’s a big jump from using proprietary data for differentiation to creating competitive data assets,” said Vanessa van de Vliet, Research Leader of Global C-Suite Studies at IBV and another co-author, in an interview with IBM Think. “Successful CDOs are able to deliver meaningful data products and employ clear measures to show how they drive key business outcomes.”

As for the path forward? “There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but it’s hard to imagine an organization succeeding without the mindset shift to see data not as a byproduct, but as a strategic asset that flows across their organization,” Cooney said. “With a focus on data stewardship, rather than data ownership, employees are freed to focus on generating new value from data, rather than struggling to access information trapped in silos.”