Building the foundation for the agentic enterprise

Enterprise IT teams, the invisible force driving our modern work world, are struggling to manage environments that have become staggeringly complex, spanning thousands of devices, multiple security domains, and a patchwork of disconnected management tools. This fragmentation runs across networking, security, infrastructure, observability, and collaboration systems and creates significant operational risk. When teams must act…

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Who authorized the algorithm? Reckoning with ungoverned AI

Three business units. One weekend. Zero governance checkpoints. That is what a Fortune 500 CIO I advise discovered last quarter when autonomous AI agents deployed by separate teams accessed customer databases, initiated vendor negotiations and generated compliance reports without a single human sign-off. Nobody verified the context protocols connecting those agents to enterprise systems. Nobody…

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American Express: Democratize analytics, not data

Data democratization has been a buzz phrase for years, but Chris Gifford, chief data officer at American Express, argues that it’s much more helpful to think about democratizing analytics. Making analytics more accessible enables employees, as well as AI agents, across the business to generate insights and act upon them within a governed framework. “It’s…

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The value of vendor relationships in the AI era

Since the rapid expansion of AI tools, the balance of power between customers and vendors has shifted dramatically. Organizations are no longer as dependent on software developers, solution architects and integration specialists to build functional tools or workflows. Today, internal teams can leverage platforms such as Claude, Lovable, Perplexity and other AI-assisted development tools to…

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Has agentic AI outgrown the data organization?

Recently, I participated in an architecture review for a Voice AI initiative. The initial proposal was heavily centered on the data required to provide context for the agent. The discussion focused on retrieval mechanisms, customer history, and knowledge access patterns. But as the review progressed, the discussion quickly went beyond data. Questions emerged around identity…

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