Why the blocker is almost always data
Model capability has stopped being the constraint for most enterprise use cases. The models available today are more than adequate for document processing, classification, retrieval-augmented question answering and workflow automation. What stops these programs is that the data underneath is late, incomplete, contradictory across systems, or governed in ways nobody checked before building.
This is unwelcome news because data foundations are less exciting than model selection, and the work looks like plumbing rather than innovation. But an organization that fixes entity resolution and data quality can deploy AI use cases repeatedly and cheaply, while one that skips it will keep producing impressive pilots that never survive contact with production.
The assessment exists to name this specifically rather than generally. 'Improve data quality' is not actionable; 'these four source systems disagree on customer identity, here's what resolving it costs and which three use cases it unblocks' is.