SBA’s Doug Robertson on tackling data fragmentation in the age of AI

Doug Robertson, Deputy Chief Information Officer at the U.S. Small Business Administration, discussed the challenges of managing data for AI workloads, highlighting the difficulty of consolidating data from various on-prem and cloud systems. The SBA is centralizing data into a large data lake and moving toward a cloud-only infrastructure. Robertson emphasized the need for a cultural shift toward AI integration in daily tasks and warned of future cost increases as AI market competition intensifies. He noted that the SBA’s AI investments will be evaluated based on their economic impact, particularly in terms of loans and small business support.