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The Data Governance Agent Series

A six-part series tracing the path from a 15-petabyte governance crisis to autonomous, agentic data governance — and what it taught me about where data stewardship is headed.

Part 1 · A Merger, 15 Petabytes, and a Question Nobody Could Answer June 5, 2026 · A merger between two financial-services giants surfaced a governance question that no amount of manual effort could answer — and set the stage for everything that followed.

Part 2 · Why 20,000 Hours of Metadata Curation Was Never Going to Work — coming soon Manually curating metadata for a 15-petabyte ecosystem would have taken an estimated 20,000 hours. The problem was never effort — it was that the approach itself didn't scale, and never would.

Part 3 · The Day We Told Data Stewards to Stop Curating Metadata — coming soon Telling experienced data stewards to stop hand-curating metadata sounded like heresy. It turned out to be the decision that unlocked everything else.

Part 4 · Building the First Governance Copilot — coming soon Before the agent came the copilot. How we built the first AI assistant for data governance — and where it hit its limits.

Part 5 · From Copilot to Data Governance Agent — coming soon A copilot waits to be asked; an agent decides what needs doing. Crossing that line reshaped how we thought about governance at scale.

Part 6 · The Future of Agentic Data Governance — coming soon Where agentic data governance heads next — and the near-term shifts that will separate the organizations governing their AI from the ones governed by it.