When an AI model underperforms against defined KPIs (70% accuracy vs required 89%), PMI-style AI evaluation guidance directs project managers to first investigate data-related issues, especially representativeness and quality of the training data, before focusing on algorithms or infrastructure. If the training data is not representative of real-world data (option A), the model may learn patterns that do not generalize to production conditions. For example, it might be overexposed to common, simple cases and underexposed to rare but critical scenarios, specific customer segments, geographies, or newer product types.

This mismatch is one of the most common causes of accuracy degradation between expected and actual performance. Ensuring representativeness involves checking that the data covers the full spectrum of operational scenarios, class distributions, time periods, and user demographics relevant to the use case. Inadequate compute (option B) more often affects training time than final accuracy, assuming the model trains to convergence. Failure to split datasets correctly (option C) leads to unreliable evaluation metrics, but the question already states an accuracy result and a KPI gap, pointing to performance, not just measurement. Algorithm selection (option D) is important but typically evaluated after confirming that the data foundation is sound. Thus, the first issue to investigate is whether training data is representative of real-world data.