Master data management (MDM) is the discipline of creating and maintaining one consistent, authoritative view of an organization’s core business data, such as customers, products, suppliers, or accounts, across all of its systems. The goal is a single source of truth that every application and team can rely on.
MDM combines data integration, deduplication, governance rules, and stewardship to reconcile records that differ between systems. For example, a bank might use MDM so the same customer is not stored three different ways across lending, support, and marketing.
MDM keeps core records consistent across the business. Whether that data is ready for a specific AI run, and whether the run can be reproduced and traced, is a separate question at the execution layer.