Leaders confident in data, but still find errors regularly

The vast majority of finance leaders feel confident about the quality of their own data, but this might be an overconfidence as a majority still regularly find errors in their own data. 

A recent survey from data extraction solutions provider Parseur found, on the one hand, 88% of U.S. business leaders said they are very or somewhat confident in the accuracy of the data feeding their analytics and AI systems but, on the other, 69% of them reported discovering errors in document-derived data at least sometimes, if not often or very often. Parseur said this implies finding mistakes in the data is a regular occurrence. 

Respondents conceded that this has caused some issues in the past, including incorrect forecasts, financial reporting issues, customer or supplier disputes, compliance or audit findings, operational delays, revenue loss and increased fraud exposure. Many described the impact of these errors as moderate or severe. 

As for where those errors were most likely to be found, the number one category was invoices at 21%, followed by purchase orders (18%) and customer-facing documents (17%). Others included contracts, intake forms and logistics documents as frequent sources of errors. 

Parseur pointed out that the quality of the AI models that everyone seems to be using today depends on the quality of the data fed into them, which implies that overconfidence in data quality is a risk factor for AI implementation. 

"What this survey shows is a confidence illusion," said Sylvestre Dupont, co-founder and CEO of Parseur. "Organizations believe their data is healthy, but persistent errors tell a different story. As companies rely more heavily on AI, data accuracy becomes foundational. That's why organizations need better support around how data is captured and validated at the point of entry."

It is unknown how aware leaders are aware of this, as overconfidence, definitionally, implies a failure to detect one's own overconfidence. Then again, there may be more awareness when it comes to AI in particular. A study earlier this year found that 79% of employees admit to pretending to know more about AI than they actually do, especially C-suite executives, 91% of whom said they pretend to have AI knowledge they don't possess.

While such a "confidence illusion" can seem grim, other data suggests it is not universal across the c-suite. Finance leaders in particular seem to be more skeptical of their data quality. A study from last year found that 37% of CFOs and 50% of senior finance leaders overall say they do not completely trust their own data or the financial data they're working with. Another study from earlier this month found 35% of CFOs saying lack of trust in the data is a top barrier to realizing return on investment for AI.