Just realized my "quick" data cleanup took 8 hours last Saturday

I needed to merge two customer lists from our CRM for a new AI lead scoring project. One list had 3,500 names in Excel, the other had 2,800 in Google Sheets. I figured it would be a 20 minute job tops, just match on email addresses right? Wrong. Turns out one system saved emails with periods, the other didn't. Plus the AI tool we use hates duplicate entries and will just skip them silently. I spent the whole day writing scripts to normalize the data and test it. Four cups of coffee later at 9 PM, I finally had a clean list and the AI could actually score leads. Has anyone else had a "simple" data prep task blow up into a whole weekend project with your AI tools?

3 comments

3 Comments

dakota4159d ago

Oh man, I feel this so hard. Those "quick" data cleanups are never quick, and the email period thing is a nightmare (happened to me too with a Mailchimp import).

grays133d ago

That email inconsistency thing is brutal and so easy to miss until you're already deep in it. Did you end up catching all the edge cases like middle initials or work vs personal email accounts that slipped through, or did you have to go back and patch those later?

william_harris8d ago

Eight hours of data cleaning sounds like my typical Tuesday when I try to "quickly" update my fantasy football roster.

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