Good data governance answers questions that come up constantly in practice: who owns the customer record when sales and support both update it, what counts as an active account, and who is allowed to export a data set. Without agreed answers, every report and every AI tool built on that data inherits the same disagreements.
AI raises the stakes because a model will confidently combine whatever data it is given, including duplicate, outdated or mislabeled records, without flagging the underlying mess. The common misconception is that governance is a one-time data cleanup. It is an ongoing set of rules and ownership, since new systems and new fields keep getting added.