Most business owners already know their data is a mess. Spreadsheets in three formats. Customer notes buried in email. Files nobody has opened in years. That mess is not the problem. Waiting for it to disappear before starting an AI project is.

This episode walks through Plan, Do, Check, Act, a framework for scoping only the data one project actually needs instead of trying to fix the whole business first. It includes a real client example built on dark data, Word documents, scattered folders, and years of untouched email, and the two specific ways this goes wrong when owners skip the scoping step or let it expand without limit.

For a small business owner with no data team, this is the difference between a project that launches this quarter and one that stays a cleanup exercise indefinitely.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Messy data i ...