Your AI Is Real-Time. Your Data Operating Model Isn’t (Yet).

Let’s be honest: many of us are trying to run 2025 AI ambitions on 2010 data habits. Nightly batches, opaque KPIs and committee-driven governance don’t survive contact with agents, RAG and copilots.

The more I work with transformation leads, the more I see two patterns emerge again and again:
1 Real-time velocity and semantically-rich data are no longer optional.
2 Federated production + centralized semantics is the only model that really scales.

This forces a redesign of the Data Operating Model (DOM):

  • Instead of “we have a data lake, we’re fine”, we need an event driven + streaming + semantics fabric.
  • Events, not just ETL.
  • A semantic layer where metrics, dimensions and policies live once and are reused everywhere.
  • RAG and agents consuming governed semantics and live APIs, not random tables.

And the “data mesh vs central model” wars? They’re a distraction. Data mesh delivers measurable outcomes.

What actually works is:

  • Federated production: domains own their data/real-time data products.
  • Centralized semantics: a small central team owns the shared language of the business, metrics and the policies around it.
  • Governance becomes computational: contracts, lineage and rules in code, not PDFs nobody reads.
  • Semantic layers are becoming the governance firewall, resolving data chaos. The semantic layer emerges as the critical “universal translator” between raw data and analytical/AI systems.
  • Data/AI/Analytics Architecture Convergence on Six Pillars: (1) Ingest/Stream, (2) Prepare/Transform, (3) Define/Model (semantic layer), (4) Store/Persist, (5) Integrate/Orchestrate, (6) Deliver/Share. The “Define/Model” stage—semantic layers + metadata management—is the control point for AI governance.

If I had to prioritise the next 12–18 months in a DOM, I’d push for three moves:
Stand up 3–5 domain teams with clear P&L-linked data products.
Create a semantic council with the authority to say “no” to broken KPIs and unsafe policies.
Fund based on outcomes: latency, reliability, AI use-case adoption and reuse of shared semantics.

The hard question is “where do we start federating ownership without losing a single source of truth on meaning and controls”?

I’d love to learn from others here:
Where is your DOM actually stuck today — events, semantics, domain ownership, or governance?

From MLOps to LLMOps to AgentOps: Building the Bridge to Autonomy

We didn’t just upgrade models—we changed the discipline. What used to be “model lifecycle management” is now autonomy lifecycle management. And with that, enterprises are facing a truth most haven’t yet operationalized: we now live in three overlapping worlds—Traditional AI, GenAI, and Agentic AI—each with its own workflow logic, tooling, and governance.

In traditional MLOps, workflows were deterministic: data in, prediction out. Pipelines were clean, measurable, and managed through platforms like MLflow, Kubeflow, BentoML, or Evidently AI. We focused on reproducibility, accuracy, and drift detection—predictable systems built for static decisions.

Then came LLMOps, and the equation broke. We moved to unstructured data, prompts, RAG, and safety filters. Non-deterministic outputs meant no two runs were ever the same. Suddenly, we were tracking token costs, hallucination rates, latency SLOs, and human feedback loops in real time—using stacks like LangChain, LlamaIndex, PromptLayer, Weights & Biases, and Credo AI.

Now we’re entering AgentOps—the autonomy layer. Systems act, reason, and collaborate through orchestrators like LangGraph, CrewAI, or AutoGen. AWS is already positioning AgentCore (on Bedrock) as the enterprise runtime—agents with persistent memory, context, and real-time observability. But the architecture shift isn’t just technical; it’s organizational. The winning model is “federated”: specialized teams with unified observability across all three layers—AI, GenAI, and Agentic AI.

When I sit with exec teams, I see the same pattern: most can build great models, but few can run parallel operational capabilities at once. And that’s the new muscle—keeping deterministic, generative, and agentic systems aligned under one governance fabric.

What makes the difference isn’t the flashiest demo; it’s boring excellence—clear SLOs, version control, cost discipline, and behavioral guardrails. That’s how we turn agents into trusted co-workers, not expensive chaos engines.

So here’s the question I leave leaders with: If your org had to strengthen just one layer this quarter—MLOps predictability, LLMOps safety, or AgentOps autonomy—where would you start, and how ready is your team to run all three in parallel?