Having fun with Banano Nano
Stop waiting for “Perfect Data”!
Martijn Veldkamp
“Strategic Technology Leader | Customer’s Virtual CTO | Salesforce Expert | Helping Businesses Drive Digital Transformation”
November 21, 2025
It’s never getting off the couch! The single greatest killer of innovation is not bad preparation but poor administration. Innovation projects are uniquely vulnerable to this because they are not simple IT upgrades, they are fundamental changes to business processes.
The Hype Trap: The 95% of failures are often “hype experiments.” They start with a some flashy tool (like a generic AI chatbot) and go in search of a problem. Rather than the other way around. They stall because they have no clear owner, no defined ROI, and no integration into the actual workflows where you know, actual people do their jobs.The 5% Success: The 5% that get traction ignore the marketing hype. They are the unglamorous, high-return areas like back-office automation. They succeed because they are domain-specific (e.g., an AI that only reads lease agreements) and deeply integrated into a specific workflow.
Just do it!
There’s a common belief that AI initiatives require perfectly clean, structured and in-shape data before you can even begin. This is a form of procrastination. Let’s start tomorrow! Data is the ultimate couch potato, it will never get in shape on its own.
Waiting for Perfect: Companies that wait for a perfect, company-wide data strategy will be waiting forever. As one report on why AI projects fail notes, Garbage in, Garbage out is still a primary obstacle, leading to projects getting stuck in endless data-wrangling phases.The Start Now approach: Successful teams, adopt a pragmatic approach. They don’t wait. One manufacturing project, for example, saw a double-digit accuracy jump not from a better model, but by simply constraining the first version to SKUs that had at least 18 months of (imperfect) historical data. They started with the data they had, proving value, and built momentum from there.
Innovation fails not from bad prep, but from hype and hesitation. Start with a real workflow, use the messy data you already have, and build momentum. The unsexy projects are the ones that will actually drive benefits.
