Culture is the barrier everyone names

Of the three themes we set for BIAAS 2027, building a data-driven culture is the one that sounds softest. Scaling AI and decision intelligence sound like program topics. Culture can sound like a poster in a corridor.

The surveys disagree. In the 2026 AI & Data Leadership Executive Benchmark Survey, 93.2% of respondents, almost all of them C-level data and AI leaders at large companies, said cultural challenges are the greatest impediment to AI adoption in their firms.¹ Practitioners rank it high as well: data-driven culture came third of twenty topics in BARC’s Trend Monitor for 2026, behind only data quality and security.²

A number that high is easy to nod at and hard to use. So it is worth looking at where the problem actually shows up.

In governance

Gartner surveyed 223 data and analytics leaders in March 2026 and asked why governance initiatives fail. Cultural resistance beat funding constraints as the main reason, 60% to 40%. From that it forecasts that by 2027, 60% of organisations that do not address the cultural side of data and analytics governance will fail to govern AI successfully.³ Anurag Raj put it more bluntly: "Data governance without a focus on a data-driven culture is an effort in vain."³

Few organisations plan for it. At Gartner’s London summit in May 2026, Sally Parker said only 26% of organisations include culture and communication in their data and analytics governance strategy.⁴ The figure suggests most governance programs are still written as policy and tooling projects, with the people expected to follow them brought in late.

In how value gets reported

A culture that trusts data needs evidence that data work pays. That evidence is thin. In Gartner’s 2025 CDAO survey, only 22% of organisations had defined, tracked and communicated business impact metrics for most of their data and analytics use cases.⁵ IBM’s 2025 study of 1,700 data leaders found only a third strongly agreeing they could clearly explain how data helps business results, and 29% with clear measures for the value of data-driven outcomes.⁶

The trend is at least moving. In the 2025 edition of the leadership benchmark, 46.4% of organisations reported a high or significant level of business value from data and AI.⁷ In the 2026 edition, 54.0% did.¹

In the gap between saying and doing

Salesforce asked business leaders in 2025 whether their organisations are data-driven, and 63% said yes, up ten points on 2023. In the same study, 49% of data and analytics leaders said their companies occasionally or frequently draw incorrect conclusions from data that lacks business context.⁸ Both can be true at once, which is the problem.

The people hired to close the gap say they are not ready for it. Gartner’s Nate Novosel told the London summit that 72% of data and analytics leaders were hired to be change agents, and only 12% are fully prepared to carry out their mandate.⁴ IBM found the talent side getting harder too: 47% of chief data officers named attracting, developing and keeping people with advanced data skills as a top challenge, up from 32% in 2023.⁶

What we are asking speakers for

Culture has a full theme at BIAAS 2027 for these reasons. What we want from speakers is the specifics: how a team got finance to sign off a metric definition, what changed when business owners started reviewing data quality reports, how a governance program was explained to the people it affects. If you have done that work and can show what happened, we would like to hear from you.