Tag Archives: DataStrategy

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

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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

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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?

Data Mesh was step one. 2026 belongs to agent ecosystems.

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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?

Agentic Operating Models: from Pilots to P&L

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We’re past the demo phase. Boards are asking a harder question: how do human-plus-agent workflows show up in cash flow—this quarter? There is a clear answer: The winners don’t “add an agent”; they redesign the work. That means owners, SLAs, guardrails, and value tracking—weekly. Not glamorous, just effective.

Here’s the short playbook I’d bring to the next ExCo:

  • Make Agents products. Name a product owner, publish SLAs (latency, accuracy, human-override rate), and set chargeback so value—and cost—land in the P&L.
  • Design human+agent flow, end-to-end. Pilots fail for organizational reasons. Tie every pilot to a customer metric and a service level from day one.
  • Build guardrails you can audit. Map risks to NIST’s Cyber AI Profile; log decisions, provenance, and incidents. “Trust” that isn’t evidenced will stall at Legal.

Does it pay?  Signals are real but uneven. A European bank modernization program cut 35-70% cycle time with reusable “agent components.” In KYC/AML, agent “factories” show 200-2000% productivity potential when humans supervise at scale. Klarna’s AI assistant handles  ~1.3M monthly interactions (~800 FTEs) with CSAT parity. Yet BCG says only ~5% are truly at value-at-scale, and Gartner warns ~40% of agentic projects could be scrapped by 2027. Operating model discipline determines who wins.

If I had 90 days:

  • 30: Inventory top 5 agent candidates; assign owners; baseline SLAs and override rates.
  • 60: Stand up an Agent Review Board (CIO/CDO/GC/CISO); add release gates and rollback.
  • 90: Ship two agents to production; publish a value dashboard (savings, cycle time, SLA hit rate) and decide scale/retire.

A candid note on risk: labor anxiety and model drift will erase ROI if we skip change management and runtime oversight. Bring HR and the 2nd line in early, and rehearse incidents like you would a cyber tabletop.

If we can’t show weekly value, SLA adherence, and audit-ready evidence, we’re still in pilot land—no matter how advanced the model sounds.

What would make your CFO believe – tomorrow – that an agent belongs on the P&L?