AI Sprawl: Causes, Risks & 7-Step Control Plan

This post details the causes and risks of AI sprawl, including metric trust collapse and the hidden tax on data teams, stemming from disconnected AI tools and a lack of centralized, trusted context. It proposes a 7-step plan to control AI sprawl, emphasizing the importance of inventorying existing tools, centralizing metadata over compute, and defining high-value metrics in a semantic layer. The plan advocates for incremental adoption of governance, starting with the most critical definitions, to ensure AI-generated answers are consistent and trustworthy.