Tag Archives: LLM

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?

I Just Analyzed the Hyperscalers’ Agent Platforms. Here’s What Shocked Me

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I’ve been deep-diving into what AWS, Azure, and Google are actually building for AI agents—and I’ll be honest, there’s a fundamental shift happening in how we’ll build autonomous systems. The three hyperscalers are making radically different bets on the future of work.

The Reality Check

All three major hyperscalers—AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform—provide full-stack solutions encompassing orchestration, deployment, security, observability, and integration capabilities. The choice between platforms increasingly depends on existing enterprise infrastructure, specific framework preferences, required runtime characteristics, and ecosystem integration needs rather than fundamental capability gaps.

When I first examined AWS AgentCore, I thought “this is impressive infrastructure.” The most mature marketplace ecosystem. The deepest tooling, built on 15+ years of cloud services. Eight-hour runtimes, isolated microVMs, seven integrated services. Then I realized—they’re not just building faster AI. They’re building systems that can actually think and act over extended periods.

Azure took a different path. They’re saying: “Most enterprises live in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Let’s embed agents there with built-in identity management and multi-agent orchestration.” Smart. Pragmatic. Different.

Google’s playing an interesting game. They’ve released the Agent Development Kit with persistent memory and an open protocol called A2A. Translation? They’re betting that agent interoperability and a framework-agnostic approach are the real competitive advantages.

Why This Matters for You

The marketplace is projected to hit $163 billion by 2030, with agents representing $24.4 billion. But numbers don’t tell the real story.

What matters is this: companies building internal agent marketplaces—treating agents as managed products with governance frameworks—are quietly pulling ahead. They’re not running scattered pilots anymore. They’re deploying reusable agents as organizational assets.

Most enterprises? Still stuck asking “should we build an agent?” Meanwhile, forward-thinking organizations are asking “how do we govern and orchestrate dozens of them?”

The Three Philosophies

AWS is betting on depth and runtime longevity. Azure is betting on ecosystem integration. Google is betting on openness and protocol standardization.

None of them are wrong. Your choice depends on where your organization lives today—and where you want it to be in 2027.

Here’s My Honest Take

The adoption of agentic AI—evidenced by marketplace growth projections and partner ecosystem expansion—signals that enterprises are moving from experimentation to production deployment.

Fifteen months ago, the conversation was “generative AI or not.” Today, it’s “which hyperscaler’s agent architecture aligns with our strategy?” That’s progress. But it also means the clock is ticking.

The gap between experimentation and real deployment is widening. Organizations that figure out governance, lifecycle management, and internal marketplaces now won’t just be faster—they’ll build moats their competitors can’t cross.

Where’s your organization in this journey? Are you still in pilot mode, or have you started thinking about what production-scale agent governance actually looks like?

I’m genuinely curious. Drop a comment.

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 Mesh or Just Another Buzzword? Cutting Through the Hype

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Let’s be honest: most of us have sat through AI demos that looked impressive… and then quietly died in the pilot graveyard. Why? Because smarter models alone don’t create enterprise value. The real shift is moving from shiny pilots to system-level architectures—what McKinsey calls the Agentic Mesh.

I’ve seen this firsthand. When teams focus only on “better models,” they often miss the harder (and less glamorous) work: wiring agents together, defining guardrails, and making sure actions are auditable. That’s where scale either happens—or fails.

What are we learning as an industry?

  • Models matter, but architecture and process discipline matter more.
  • Standards like MCP and A2A are becoming the “USB-C of AI,” cutting down brittle integrations.
  • Governance isn’t optional anymore—ISO/IEC 42001, NIST AI RMF, and “human-on-the-loop” ops are quickly becoming the baseline.
  • We have to treat agents like digital colleagues: assign roles, permissions, even offboarding procedures.
  • And without proper observability—AgentOps, logs, kill-switches—autonomy can turn into automated chaos.

For executives, here’s what I’d do today if I were scaling this in your shoes:

  1. Name it. Create a platform team that owns the “mesh”—protocols, policy engines, memory hubs, observability.
  2. Start small, but measure big. Choose a few revenue- or cost-linked workflows, run shadow/canary pilots, and track hard KPIs.
  3. Bake in governance early. Build an agent registry, enforce least-privilege access, and red-team agents before production.
  4. Scale with discipline. Treat agent patterns like products—documented, reusable, and measured.

Here’s my takeaway: the winners won’t be those with the smartest model, but those who can turn agents into an integrated, trusted system—a digital workforce that’s secure, observable, and genuinely valuable.

👉 What’s been your biggest blocker moving from pilots to scaled AI systems—technology, governance, or people?

AI’s Black Box Nightmare: How EU IA Act Are Exposing the Dark Side of GenAI and LLM architectures

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With the EU AI Act entering into force, two of the most 𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐫𝐞𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 for high-risk and general-purpose AI systems (GPAI) are 𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 and 𝐅𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬. But current GenAI and LLM architectures are fundamentally at odds with these goals.
𝐀.- 𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐛𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐫𝐬:
* 𝐎𝐩𝐚𝐪𝐮𝐞 𝐀𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐬: LLMs like GPT or LLaMA operate as high-dimensional black boxes—tracing a specific output to an input is non-trivial.
* 𝐏𝐨𝐬𝐭-𝐡𝐨𝐜 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐋𝐢𝐦𝐢𝐭𝐬: Tools like SHAP or LIME offer correlation, not causality—often falling short of legal standards.
* 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐭 𝐒𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐲: Minor prompt tweaks yield different outputs, destabilizing reproducibility.
* 𝐄𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐁𝐞𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐨𝐫𝐬: Unintended behaviors appear as models scale, making explanation and debugging unpredictable.
𝐁.- 𝐅𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐁𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐫𝐬:
* 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐁𝐢𝐚𝐬: Models absorb societal bias from uncurated internet-scale data, amplifying discrimination risks.
* 𝐋𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐨𝐟 𝐒𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐀𝐭𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐮𝐭𝐞 𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚: Limits proper disparate impact analysis and subgroup auditing.
* 𝐍𝐨 𝐆𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐭𝐡 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐅𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬: Open-ended outputs make “fairness” hard to define, let alone measure.
* 𝐁𝐢𝐚𝐬 𝐄𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐯𝐞𝐬: AI agents adapt post-deployment—biases can emerge over time, challenging longitudinal accountability.
𝐂.- 𝐂𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐬-𝐂𝐮𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐃𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐬:
* Trade-offs exist between 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐟𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬—enhancing one can reduce the other.
* No standard benchmarks = fragmented compliance pathways.
* Stochastic outputs break reproducibility and traceability.
𝐖𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐤𝐞𝐲 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐲 𝐫𝐞𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐧 𝐀𝐮𝐠𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓, we urgently need:
• New model designs with interpretability-by-default,
• Scalable bias mitigation techniques,
• Robust, standardized toolkits and benchmarks.
As we shift from research to regulation, engineering 𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐡𝐲 𝐀𝐈 isn’t just ethical—it’s mandatory.