A solid data foundation is crucial for successful AI initiatives in financial services, preventing the "garbage in, garbage out" problem. CFOs demand a clear and quick ROI on AI investments, requiring IT leaders to demonstrate cost savings or efficiency gains. Financial firms must effectively harness their data assets with the right tools for structuring, retrieving, and analyzing data. Scalability is another challenge for AI-driven processes due to the vast memory required for large-scale vector search. Elasticsearch developed BBQ (Better Binary Quantization) to address this challenge through vector compression. BBQ compresses vectors by 32x, achieving a 95% reduction in memory usage while maintaining speed and recall. BBQ has been updated with an improved algorithm, offering up to 20% recall gains on some datasets. Elasticsearch BBQ outperforms OpenSearch FAISS in speed and throughput without sacrificing accuracy. The availability of features is at Elastic's sole discretion and third party AI tool usage requires caution regarding data privacy. Elastic and Elasticsearch are trademarks of Elasticsearch N.V.