The abundance of data burdens company leaders when making important business decisions. Almost nine out of ten would like to hand over responsibility to a machine.

Data is the key to business success. You hear this statement more and more often these days, but in practice it’s not that easy. Oracle surveyed 14,000 executives and employees about how they and their organizations use data. The study shows that an abundance of data puts stress on decision-makers in particular.

decision anxiety

Three out of four business leaders say they are “bombarded” with data when making decisions. But collecting the data and determining which sources are reliable takes a lot of time and effort. Even when analyzing the data, things often go wrong. For example, 74 percent say the data visualizations they are presented with are often irrelevant to the decision being made, while 77 percent believe data is only useful for data scientists.

The inability to work efficiently with data also impacts executive well-being. Six out of ten face a dilemma every day where they don’t know what decision to make. 71 percent procrastinate decisions because they feel overwhelmed by data, and 87 percent feel stressed because they doubt decisions they’ve made in the past 12 months.

Perhaps the most striking statistic from the study is that 85 percent of business leaders would trust a machine to make key data-intensive decisions. Will companies soon be led by AI?

Trust data

Nevertheless, confidence in the data remains high. Almost all respondents believe that data helps them make better decisions in the areas of human resources, finance, supply chain and customer experience. Data-driven companies also appear more reliable and successful. You can download the full Oracle report here.