Don't Automate Chaos Applies to Data Too

My rule for AI is simple: don't automate chaos. It applies to data first.

Messy collection. No retention schedule. Mystery vendors holding copies of everything. Datasets nobody documented. That's chaos, and an AI system won't fix it. It will scale it — faster collection of the wrong things, longer retention of what should've been deleted, confident decisions built on shaky ground.

The order matters. Govern the data first: know what you have, collect less, keep it clean, delete on schedule, write it down. Then bring in the AI.

Do it the other way around and you'll spend twice the money to learn what the tidy teams already knew.

Don't automate chaos. Especially not data chaos.

I explain frameworks; I don't give legal counsel.