AI is not magic; without good data it’s trash in, trash out: AvePoint CEO

Singapore has all the advanced use cases of developed markets for AI and data governance, said Avepoint CEO Dr Tianyi Jiang.

SINGAPORE – Companies racing to deploy artificial intelligence tools may find their efforts unexpectedly throttled by the quality and organisation of their internal data.

AI systems such as customer service chatbots, workplace assistants and automated workflows depend heavily on well-structured information.

But in many organisations, up to 90 per cent of their data is scattered across e-mails, documents, chat messages and multiple platforms, stored in different formats with varying access permissions.

“AI is tech and not magic. Without good data, it’s just trash in and trash out,” said AvePoint chief executive Tianyi Jiang.

His firm’s suite of tools integrates into enterprise platforms to help companies organise and secure large volumes of information within enterprise systems such as Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Microsoft 365.

This function has become more critical as companies use internal data to power AI systems.

“It’s simply not good enough to just use a commercially available product like Claude or ChatGPT because they are trained on data on the internet,” he stressed.

AvePoint was founded in the US in 2001 by Jiang and co-founder Xunkai Gong, with its first product a backup solution for Microsoft’s early SharePoint collaboration platform.

Now a massive player in the software ecosystem space and with Microsoft as one of its biggest partners, AvePoint has expanded its focus beyond cloud-based software data management to AI-related offerings spanning education, modernisation and governance.

Jiang said the company was able to grow these businesses due to its strong reputation, earned over the past 17 years in data management. The firm operates in 80 countries and handles about one zettabyte of data – or one trillion gigabytes – globally for governments and banks.

After a visit to Singapore in 2008, where he met his future wife, Jiang decided to open AvePoint’s Singapore office a year later, drawn by its appeal as a base for business.