Why This is the GOLDEN ERA for Data People

Data foundations are the real bottleneck for agentic AI, and most teams are governing the wrong layer. In this episode of AI Radicals, host Satyen Sangani talks with Sanjeev Mohan, industry analyst and author of Designing the AI-Driven Data Foundations, about why AI's biggest promises still rest on unglamorous data fundamentals, and why agents are breaking the old rules of governance. Sanjeev walks through his layered model of metadata, semantics, context, ontology, and knowledge graphs, and the two dig into where data products fit in that stack. They debate whether governance belongs to the agent or the data itself, why deterministic rules must live with the data rather than be re-explained to every model or prompt, and how agentic systems generate entirely new categories of data that nobody has a framework for governing yet. "There's a concept 100% related to the whole idea of context and data products, and that is governance. Now we are in the realm of AI, which is a very different beast to govern." Listen to this episode to learn: Why semantics, not storage or compute, is becoming the real moat in the AI stack Why agentic governance has to cover input, output, and runtime, not just clean data in and clean data out Why data teams are entering a golden era, shifting from backup-and-restore work to business strategy and reusable data products