DataDriven26: Trust Is the New Infrastructure — From Retail Shelves to Runways

Autonomous systems are moving from concept to reality: same-day fulfillment, automated replenishment, dynamic pricing, predictive maintenance, fleet optimization. Whether you’re moving dog food or jet engines, Aarti Bajaj, Executive Director, Data Strategy, at Boeing, argues it all depends on one thing above all else: trustworthy data.

Drawing on a hard-earned lesson from a sudden industry upheaval that made her accountable for reporting, lineage, and controls overnight, Aarti shows why trust is the real failure point in modern systems: when data fails, trust erodes, and systems break. She connects retail and aerospace to explain two shifts reshaping the data mandate—from reporting to prediction and from compliance to confidence—and why “data as an asset” is mostly a myth, even as leaders still ask, “Which number do I trust?”

AI makes the stakes non-negotiable. Bad data at human speed causes delays. Bad data at machine speed can cause disasters. The next generation of leaders won’t ask how much data you have — they’ll ask which decisions you can safely automate, and why. Trust is the infrastructure. CDOs are the builders.