Across the tech industry, the focus of artificial intelligence is shifting from building smarter models to securing consistent return on investment. To this end, companies are realizing that real AI ROI comes from using their data effectively to power AI at scale.

Organizations are working to overcome barriers to realizing ROI from AI by focusing on innovations and partnerships that unlock greater value from their data. NetApp Inc. describes this moment as not just the dawn of enterprise AI, but the beginning of the era of intelligent data, according to Russell Fishman (pictured, right), senior director of solutions product management at NetApp.

Nvidia’s Tony Paikeday and NetApp’s Russell Fishman talk with theCUBE about AI ROI and data management architectures.

“ROI for us is really all about the difference between trying AI out and actually getting it into a production context — where there’s actually an ROI associated with it,” Fishman said. “Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of organizations that have been fairly successful with AI up to now. I think we’re just on the precipice of being able to open up to a much broader set of customers and organizations that don’t have that sophistication [that] just want to get to that answer, get to the ROI, get to the outcomes.”

Fishman and Tony Paikeday (pictured, left), senior director of product marketing, AI systems at Nvidia Corp., spoke with theCUBE’s Christophe Bertrand at the NetApp Insight 2025 event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how enterprises can achieve real AI ROI by unifying and activating their data. (* Disclosure below.)

To achieve AI ROI, unified data remains crucial

Last week, NetApp outlined its new AI Data Engine, based on Nvidia’s AI Platform reference design. AI innovation at the model layer has produced powerful reasoning systems capable of delivering highly valuable insights, according to Paikeday.

“I think what we’re really realizing is that to derive ROI from this, AI needs to be more than great models,” he said. “It needs to have data — data that feeds context — because without context, your AI models [and] your agents cannot understand your customers, your intellectual property, your culture, your unique vocabulary, so data matters more now than ever before.”

The problem is that nearly 90% of enterprise data is unstructured and spread across multiple clouds, on-premises systems and edge environments. Over time, this fragmentation has created data silos that make it difficult to access and leverage information effectively, according to Paikeday.

“If you are trying to tap into this data to give your models more context — to give your agents the ability to give more insightful answers — you need to be able to act on that data and AI: pre-process it, vectorize it, retrieve it where that data lives without proliferating more copies, more silos, more complexity,” he said. “I think this is why the partnership is so valuable, because we’re bringing our technologies together to deliver an AI data platform that can solve this problem for enterprises.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the NetApp Insight 2025 event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the NetApp Insight event. Neither NetApp Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE