At ProMat 2025, keynote speaker Paul Zikopoulos told the audience that an information architect is critical for artificial intelligence.
ProMat 2025’s kickoff relayed two important trends. One, the mullet is back, baby! The other is that you can’t have artificial intelligence (AI) without information architects (IA).
In his keynote speech, “The Data Effect: The Price of Knowing,” Paul Zikopoulos, writer, speaker and vice president of Cognitive BigData Systems at IBM, told attendees that AI doesn’t exist with an IA.
“I always tell people, you can’t have AI with an IA, an information architect,” Zikopoulos said. “You folks are sitting on your data.”
It’s helpful, Zikopoulos said, to think of workflows as a “monolithic beast.” If you break those workflows into smaller pieces, AI can help automate your processes, but it all starts with data broken out of a larger workflow “monolith.”
Social media’s role in data consumption
Social media, he said, is an excellent example of why big companies love data. Gemini, ChatGPT, OpenAI and other large language models, mine data on social media.
“As you know, if you’re not paying for it, you’re a product being sold,” he noted of companies mining data for valuable marketing information.
However, with as much data as the large language models possesses, less than 1% is enterprise data, meaning digital information an organization collects to support its core business activities. This, Zikopoulos said, is an advantage.
“Data’s like a gym membership,” he added. “You can have one, but if you don’t use it and you don’t show up and you don’t keep using it, you’ll get nothing out of it.”
Data needs to drive business
Similarly, he said, data should be used to drive business forward.
Data is critical for determining how our Generation Z and Generation Alpha will integrate into the workforce. Zikopoulos used his daughter as an example. She is a junior in college. After four years of observing her and her friends, he learned some things.
“Number one is the mullet is in,” he joked.
Some of the other insights from his daughter’s generation, the generation soon joining the workforce, is that there has been a shift in modality. His daughter, for example, doesn’t use USB, instead favoring the cloud. Visual expression is another shift. Unlike the mullet, emails are out. Swipes, gestures and augmented reality are the ways in which the incoming workforce communicates.
AI, he noted, bringing everything full circle, is a way we can analyze data like the above observations that we don’t yet understand. That’s why an information architect is critical for AI.
