AI-Ready Data vs. Analytics-Ready Data

Before we dive in, we want to take a moment to thank you for being here with us as we step into 2026! The Modern Data 101 community exists because of your curiosity, your ideas, and your willingness to think more deeply about data. We’ll continue to share the best resources, emerging ideas, and important pivots shaping the modern data world, and we hope you’ll stay with us not just through 2026 but for many years to come. A Very Happy New Year! 🥂Now, Let’s Dive In!Before we talk about modern data, or AI-ready data, we have to step back and ask a much older question: what is data fundamentally for? Strip away the platforms, the pipelines, the dashboards, and the acronyms, and data resolves into something far simpler. Data exists to reduce uncertainty,support decisions, and ultimately enable action.Everything else we build on top of it is secondary.