I used to think “more catalogs, better lakes” would get us there. Then I watched agents start acting—not just assisting—and realized our data products weren’t ready for that responsibility.

Here’s the simple truth I’m seeing with executive teams: bad data becomes bad decisions at scale. If our contracts, SLOs, lineage, and internal marketplaces are weak, agents will scale the wrong thing—errors—at machine speed. That’s a board-level conversation, not an IT complaint.

What changes in practice?
We evolve the data operating model from “publish & pray” to agent-grade: data products with p95 latency targets, explicit access scopes, and traceable provenance. Hyperscalers are now shipping real agent runtimes (memory, identity, observability—and billing), which means the economics and accountability just got very real.

How I’m approaching it with leaders:

• Certify data products for agents. Each product has an owner, SLOs (latency/freshness), and mandatory provenance. If it can’t meet its SLOs, it doesn’t feed agents—full stop.
• Enforce least privilege by skill. Approvals are tied to the actions an agent can perform, not just the datasets it can see.
• Make observability a product. Trace every call (inputs, tools, sources, cost, outcome). No trace, no production.

Practical next steps:
Start by mapping your top 10 data products to target agent skills and auditing them. Set SLOs. Assign owners. Then pick one product—implement policy-aware access and lineage capture, record evaluation traces for every agent call, and scale it. Afterwards, launch an internal Agent Marketplace that connects certified skills and certified data products, with change gates based on risk tier.

KPIs I push for:

• % of agent invocations served by certified data products meeting SLOs (with recorded lineage)
• $/successful agent task at target quality and latency
• Incident rate per 1,000 runs (blocked vs executed)

Behind the scenes, the shift that surprised me most wasn’t technical—it was managerial. The winning teams treat this as work redesign: new ownership, new runbooks, new kill criteria. When we do that, agents unlock speed and resilience. When we don’t, they magnify our mess.

If you had to fix just one weak link this quarter—SLOs, provenance, or access controls—which would it be, and why?