Rethinking Data Quality for AI-Driven Systems: Evidence from Practitioner Interviews

Data quality research has usually treated data as an input that is stored, processed, and validated. In AI-driven software-intensive systems, data also shapes model behavior, evaluation, and lawful use. Empirical evidence remains limited on how practitioners define, assess, and manage quality under these conditions. We interviewed 16 practitioners from nine organizations and analyzed the transcripts using reflexive thematic analysis and developed six themes from participants' accounts. In AI systems, traceability shifted from modular debugging to attributing model behavior, while using models as quality assessors introduced circularity. Agent context and memory became data objects, and sy...

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