Your data quality problem is older than your AI problem

Everyone is suddenly worried about AI and their Salesforce data. The data was already broken. AI just made it everyone’s problem instead of the admin’s quiet problem.

Here is a pattern I keep running into. An org turns on an AI feature that reads Contact and Account data. Within a weekend it creates thousands of records that should not exist, because the matching logic trusted data that was never clean. One org generated roughly 12,000 junk Account records over a Friday-to-Monday window. The kill switch stopped it in about 90 seconds. The cleanup took nine days, since the records were never tagged and nobody could query what the system had touched.

The data problems did not arrive with AI. Duplicate accounts, half-filled required fields, routing rules silently misassigning records for years. All of it was sitting there. A human looked past it. An agent acts on it at machine speed.

Here is what I wish more teams got. AI is an amplifier. If 40 percent of your contacts are wrong, the agent does not fix that. It scales it.

Before you turn anything on, run the boring audit. Duplicate rate, field completeness, ownership of the matching logic. The fix is unglamorous and it is the whole game.

A few things I check first if that is helpful.