The Real Cost of ROT — Compliance, Security & AI ROI
Your company paid $30/user/month to add Microsoft 365 Copilot — the version that actually connects to your corporate data in SharePoint, Teams, and Outlook.
And your ROT data is preventing it from reaching its potential.
Let’s talk about the costs nobody puts in a budget line.
Licensing waste
You’re paying for AI that can’t perform because it’s reasoning over polluted context. Every bad answer erodes user trust. Low adoption = wasted spend. It’s that simple.
Productivity loss (the one nobody measures)
When Copilot gives a wrong answer, your employee doesn’t just move on. They verify it. They ask a colleague. They search manually. That “AI time savings” quietly becomes AI overhead.
Compliance exposure
Obsolete data doesn’t just confuse AI. It can surface information that should have been deleted under your retention policies. In a regulated industry, that’s not a data quality problem. It’s a legal problem.
Security risk
Redundant copies of sensitive files spread across your environment expand your attack surface. Ransomware doesn’t discriminate between your important data and your ROT. It encrypts everything.
The organizations winning with enterprise AI aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest rollout.
They’re the ones who did the foundational work first: understanding what data they have, where it lives, what’s worth keeping, and what needs to go.
Data readiness used to be a data team problem.
Today, it’s a CTO problem. A CFO problem. A board-level risk.
Next week: I’ll introduce a capability that changes how enterprises actually find and fix this problem at scale, at the intersection of data security, privacy, and AI readiness.
What’s your organization’s biggest barrier to data hygiene?
