Top executives are doing more than just paying lip service to the idea that data is a strategic asset, but whether they’re doing so out of ambition or fear is an open question.

That’s according to the sixth annual study of 60 senior executives at primarily U.S. financial services firms released today by NewVantage Partners LLC. It found that the executives unanimously agree that having a data strategy is a top priority for their firm.

Their commitment also appears sincere. An overwhelming 97 percent of executive said they are investing in data analytics, big data and artificial intelligence projects, and 73 percent said they have already seen measurable returns, up from the 48 percent who said that in last year’s survey.

The results also validate recent findings by Gartner Inc. and others that the role of chief data officer is rapidly going mainstream. The percentage of responding executives who said their organization now has a CDO grew from 32 percent last year to nearly 56 percent this year.

However, the results also raise questions about how organizations are deploying their big-data strategies, whether defensively or in pursuit of bigger business opportunities. Nearly four in five executives said they fear disruption from data-driven companies, with artificial intelligence seen as the most potentially devastating competitive weapon. Nearly all said their firms are trying to respond by shifting to a data-driven culture, but only about a third have succeeded so far. The No. 1 impediment? Culture.

The Amazon effect

The candor with which top executives expressed fears of digital disruption surprised NewVantage Chief Executive Randy Bean. “I think there’s a growing concern that companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon, which are extremely data-driven, are well-situated to enter a number of industries,” he said.

Also surprising is that fears are being so openly expressed by financial services executives. “This is one of most traditionally risk-averse industries,” Bean said. “These executives are typically the ones who say they have things under control.”

Big data has put AI on the radar, a fact that prompted NewVantage to ask about AI’s disruptive potential specifically. More than seven in 10 executives agreed that AI and machine learning will have the greatest impact on their firms over the next decade, dwarfing the 12 percent who cited the second most-mentioned disrupter: cloud computing. And while security breaches were seen by nearly a third of respondents as the single greatest threat to their businesses, a nearly equal 29.5 percent pointed to insufficient agility, while 13 percent said it’s an inability to leverage data as a weapon.

The upshot is that companies are scrambling to create strategies around data. “A few years ago a data strategy was seen as something that was good to have, but there’s urgency now that if companies aren’t thinking about how to use data as an asset, they’ll fall behind,” Bean said.

The CDO is widely seen as the driver of such strategies, but although NewVantage found that the position is now firmly entrenched, its definition is anything but clear. Some 44 percent of executives said they believed the CDO’s primarily responsibility should be to develop a data and analytics strategy, but nearly 27 percent said the person should be more of an enabler of other people’s big data strategies. Only one in five said the CDO should lead all data and analytics initiatives.

There was a similar split over the issue of the ideal CDO background, with about a third of executives saying the best candidate is an external change agent while a nearly equal percentage favored an insider. “There now seems to be consensus that the CDO role is critical, but a complete lack of consensus on what that role should be,” Bean said.

The findings differ somewhat from a Gartner report published last month. It found that the CDO position is rapidly evolving from its initial tactical focus on data governance, data quality and compliance to strategic outcomes such as building a more data-driven culture and developing new revenue sources.

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