Why AI-Powered, Human-Refined Golden Records Outperform Master Data Management (MDM)

• Customer 360 views help businesses gain a competitive edge and secure a leadership position in an increasingly complex marketplace.
• Traditional, rules-based master data management (MDM) solutions are not equipped to handle the challenges posed by the volume, velocity, and variety of data, particularly in meeting the data quality demands of a modern era driven by artificial intelligence (AI).
• Data-savvy organizations are embracing AI-powered, human-refined golden records as a faster, better way to sell more effectively, boost marketing outcomes, spot new opportunities, reduce operational costs, and make more informed decisions.

Having a Customer 360-degree view is the gold standard for successful companies. It provides a holistic view that elevates customer experiences, uncovers new revenue opportunities, and delivers personalized support. However, many customers fail to achieve a holistic, 360-degree customer view despite investing years and millions of dollars in technology aimed at doing just that. Are you wondering why? It's because their data is fragmented.

The process of unifying data across multiple data sources and datasets in order to create a single, authoritative, accurate version of the customer, otherwise known as a golden record, is hard work. It requires organizations to embrace new technologies and new approaches to data management that make accurate, comprehensive, and durable data accessible to every decision-maker across the organization.

Having access to these golden records is crucial for identifying new business opportunities, managing risks, and improving operational efficiency—benefits that collectively drive business value and lead to astounding results. But too often, businesses are relying on outdated, rules-based master data management (MDM) solutions to solve the challenge of fragmented data. And to be frank, MDM solutions simply can't keep up with today's dynamic data.

The Challenges with Rules-Based Master Data Management (MDM) Solutions

Traditional MDM solutions have been around for decades, with many companies relying on them to solve their data mastering needs. Their promise: to create a “golden record” by using rules to drive the standardization, validation, and governance of data across systems and silos within an organization.

When first introduced, MDM solutions and their rules-based approach to data management were considered innovative. But today, they're proving to be a liability. Companies are dedicating inordinate amounts of time and large numbers of resources to writing, modifying, and maintaining rules. Because when your data changes, the rules in your MDM solution break. And fixing these rules requires significant amounts of time and manual human effort, making it difficult for companies to scale as their data evolves and changes (which it will). As a result, companies using MDM are unable to realize the promise of the golden record. 

Adding insult to injury, MDM implementations are costly, time-consuming, and complex, relying on teams of professionals to ensure project success. And because they have limited flexibility and scalability, MDM solutions often become silos themselves, exacerbating the very issue they are trying to solve. 

A New Paradigm for Data Management: AI-Powered, Human-Refined Golden Records

Data-savvy organizations know that traditional, rules-based MDM solutions will not give them the competitive edge they need to thrive in today's dynamic business environment. That's why they are making the pivot to modernize their data management systems by embracing AI-powered, human-refined golden records.

AI-powered, human-refined golden records provide the fastest and most-effective way to give every decision-maker access to the accurate, comprehensive, and durable data they need to identify new business opportunities, manage risks, and improve operational efficiency—benefits that collectively drive business value and lead to astounding results. 

Using AI, companies can reap the value and benefits that rules-based MDM solutions simply can't deliver:

• Great results out of the box: By combining embedded similarity with human feedback, AI can deliver best-in-class match rates with external data, which ensures the data is accurate and reliable.
• Tailored to the consumer. AI ensures that customer interactions are informed and relevant by creating a personalized, single view of each customer and validating it with human insight.
• More use = increased effectiveness: Machine-generated feedback helps AI-powered solutions learn and improve over time, which, in turn, ensures that the system keeps pace as business needs and data landscapes evolve.

While AI can handle a lot of the heavy lifting, it's not infallible. Algorithms might struggle with data that is exceptionally noisy, ambiguous, or complex. That’s why human-refinement is critical.

"Human-refined" highlights the valuable role humans play in ensuring the quality and trustworthiness of AI-powered golden records. Humans can apply judgment and domain expertise that corrects errors, makes judgement calls on ambiguous cases, or provides additional context the AI might not have considered.

AI-powered, human-refined golden records combine the best of both worlds: AI's efficiency and scalability with human intuition and expertise to ensure the highest level of accuracy and reliability.
Creating Customer Golden Records at Toyota Motors Europe

The Challenge: Toyota Motors Europe (TME) launched an initiative to grow business by putting the customer closer to the center of their activities. But with 30 national marketing and sales companies (NMSCs) operating across 50 countries, each with their own source systems and approaches to integration, made it challenging for TME to gain a consolidated view of customers across NMSCs. In addition, customer data varied in quality and remained trapped in silos, making it difficult for TME to innovate, collaborate, and scale. 

The Solution: Using Tamr’s unique combination of AI and human intelligence, TME consolidated data across silos, making it easier to add new sources as their data grew. Tamr also enabled TME to clean, standardize, and track changes and improvements to data, eliminating errors and increasing reliability. Finally, using human refinement, TME was able to validate results and capture input, which improved overall trust and accuracy. 
The Result: TME gained unified view of customers, providing the scalability, flexibility, and collaboration they needed to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Tamr also enabled TME to optimize upsell opportunities and reduce duplicate customer records by 40%, which improved overall marketing and sales efficiency and effectiveness.

For over 10 years, Tamr has focused on using AI/ML to tackle the hard problem of performing accurate, enterprise data entity resolution at scale. And now we're ready to help you.

Download our latest e-book, Faster, Cheaper, Better: Why AI-Powered, Human-Refined Golden Records Outperform MDM, to discover why leading organizations are ditching their rules-based master data management (MDM) solutions in favor of advanced AI technology to address their golden record problem.