data meaning disconnect

As companies race to embrace AI, many are hitting a wall I call the "data meaning disconnect." While data may be unified, its meaning is not. A single business term like "customer churn" or "active lead" often has multiple, conflicting definitions across different systems and teams. A customer satisfaction score (CSAT) can be defined on widely different scales with varying definitions of “good.” This problem is compounded by "semantic sprawl," where different dashboards have slightly different logic for the same metric—like one report defining a week as starting on Monday and another on Sunday.