Salesforce on Tuesday released its State of Data & Analytics report based on about 8,000 companies worldwide, including 500 in South Korea.

The report said about 60 percent of South Korean companies rate themselves as data-driven organisations, up 28 percentage points from 2023. It said 75 percent of South Korean firms reported growing pressure to create business value using data.

It also found a gap between awareness and results. Of leading South Korean companies in data and analytics, 84 percent said a strong data foundation is the key factor for AI success, but 61 percent of them said they are having difficulty linking data to actual business priorities.

Respondents cited disconnected data structures as the biggest factor blocking performance creation. Leading companies estimated that 15 percent of corporate data is trapped in silos and cannot be accessed or used, and 66 percent of respondents said the most valuable business insights exist within that inaccessible data. About 80 percent said disconnected data leads to weaker AI capabilities and revenue losses.

Investment strategies are also changing. Chief information officers worldwide are allocating four times more budget to data infrastructure and management than to AI technology itself. In South Korea, 56 percent of companies are adopting a zero-copy data integration strategy that connects data without physically copying it.

On governance, only 43 percent of global corporate executives have established a formal data governance framework, while 86 percent of leading South Korean companies said adopting AI requires a completely new governance and security approach.

Park Se-jin (박세진), head of Salesforce Korea, said integrating scattered data within companies and building a trusted data foundation will be a core driver of corporate growth. He said the company will actively support a shift to an agentic enterprise where AI agents and humans can collaborate organically.