#data-governance

#data-governance

AI was everywhere, but I wasn't focused on product launches. I was looking at how companies think about data itself: how it's shared, governed and ultimately turned into decisions. And across conversations with executives and sessions on security and compliance, a pattern emerged: the technical limitations that once justified locking data down have largely been solved. What remains difficult is human. Alignment, trust and confidence inside organizations are now the true barriers.

Before enterprises can deploy AI agents that actually work, they need something most organizations don't have: a single, authoritative source of truth.

Salesforce data migration sounds straightforward on paper. In practice, it almost never is. The system goes live, everyone gets access, and nothing seems obviously wrong at first. Then little questions start popping up. A report doesn't quite line up. A dashboard only makes sense after a few extra filters. Sales reps pull numbers into Excel just to feel sure. Before long, Salesforce is technically running, but confidence in the data hasn't caught up.

AutoDS was bootstrapped and eventually reached 1.8 million users, generated more than $1 billion in user revenue, and exited successfully to Fiverr. From its earliest days, the company was fast moving, the kind of place where speed was strategic and rapid implementation felt like the natural way to operate. But as Pozin's team moved from pilots to production, they learned that speed alone was not enough. AI only delivers results when the right data foundations and ownership structures are in place.

Glean Chat offers an experience very similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT, but limited to an enterprise's content and resource boundaries, Jain said. When a user makes a natural language-based query, the company's search technology uses APIs to check all the content and activity - including information in applications - pertaining to the query before storing it in a customer's cloud environment. The data stored is then fed to large language models (LLMs), which have been trained on that particular enterprise's data,

Unverified and low quality data generated by artificial intelligence (AI) models - often known as AI slop - is forcing more security leaders to look to zero-trust models for data governance, with 50% of organisations likely to start adopting such policies by 2028, according to Gartner's seers. Currently, large language models (LLMs) are typically trained on data scraped - with or without permission - from the world wide web and other sources including books, research papers, and code repositories.

In a move that surprised no one, OpenAI has confirmed it will begin testing advertisements in ChatGPT. Ads will be trialled with free users in the United States, appearing in clearly labelled slots above or below chatbot responses. Paid tiers (Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise) remain ad-free. OpenAI insists ads won't influence the chatbot's answers, won't be displayed alongside sensitive topics such as health or politics, and user conversations won't be shared with advertisers...

In the fall, roughly three years after generative artificial intelligence tools went mainstream and some higher education institutions began partnering with tech companies, researchers surveyed 1,960 staff, administrators and faculty across more than 1,800 public and private institutions about AI's relationship to their work. Ninety-two percent of respondents said their institution has a work-related AI strategy-which includes piloting AI tools, evaluating both opportunities and risks and encouraging use of AI tools. And while the vast majority of respondents (89 percent) said they aren't required to use AI tools for work, 86 percent said they want to or will continue to use AI tools in the future.

The AI-centric security product demo looked impressive. The vendor spoke confidently about autonomous detection, self-learning defences, and AI-driven remediation. Charts moved in real time, alerts resolved themselves, and threats seemed to vanish before human analysts even noticed them.

As early adopters have discovered, Copilot delivers real transformation only when it becomes an integral part of critical workflows. Enterprises are beginning to treat generative AI not as an isolated productivity tool, but as the connective layer linking business applications, data, and human judgment. Nowhere is this shift clearer than in organizations using Microsoft 365 Copilot as part of a broader architecture that spans CRMs, low-code platforms, and specialized AI systems.

Keenan wrote that Salesforce users have been building their own MCP servers using OpenAI's Apps SDK and exposing Salesforce data to various frontier LLMs in the bargain. That puts the company's data outside the governance and usage metering of Salesforce. "The thing that I worry about, and what I wanted to get ahead of, was homegrown MCP servers from customers just spitting out data to OpenAI around the trust boundary," Billmaier told Keenan. "And with this, we're actually kind of being full of our destiny as we think about other players emerging in this space."

For technology leaders, this year has been defined less by what to promise and more by how to deliver. The conversation has matured, but unevenly. Some organisations are now treating sustainability as an organisational capability, whilst others are still trying to reconcile their ambitions with fragmented systems and incomplete data. The task for 2026 will be to embed sustainability into the digital and operational fabric of business - to move decisively from strategy to systems.

Upper is based on W3C standards such as RDF for conceptual graph representation and SHACL for validation, and it enables the principle of "model once, represent everywhere" across the data ecosystem.Upper organizes concepts through keyed entities, their attributes, and their relationships across domain boundaries. The modeling grammar and validation structure are designed to maintain consistency as definitions evolve. Keyed concepts can be extended monotonically, allowing new attributes or relationships without modifying existing definitions allowing domains to expand over time without breaking existing models.

Allie Miller, for example, recently ranked her go-to LLMs for a variety of tasks but noted, "I'm sure it'll change next week." Why? Because one will get faster or come up with enhanced training in a particular area. What won't change, however, is the grounding these LLMs need in high-value enterprise data, which means, of course, that the real trick isn't keeping up with LLM advances, but figuring out how to put memory to use for AI.

Computer Weekly met up with Glasneck during the UK and Ireland SAP User Group (UKISUG) conference in Birmingham at the start of December to discuss the role of strong data management in successful SAP S4/Hana projects. The company has grown through acquisition. This resulted in 50 or so ERP systems in operation, which were not truly integrated. Imperial Brands recognised it needed to bring all of these legacy ERP systems together into one single S4/Hana instance.

Europe's long-running struggle to define digital sovereignty - and to turn it into something practical - is reaching an inflection point. That was the message at this year's Gaia-X Summit in Porto, where executives and governments argued that the continent finally has the technical foundations for sovereign data sharing. All it needs now is the political will, economic models, and global partnerships to make it work at scale.

2025 has been a transformative year for cybersecurity, with emerging technologies and evolving threats changing the landscape as we once knew it. Reflecting on the year, there are several trends that come to my mind, both good and bad. Organizations prepared for a quantum future, foreign adversaries and cybercriminals alike made strategic moves, and industries as a whole found themselves targeted with waves of cyberattacks (such as the case with the retail sector).

Snowflake has signed an agreement to acquire Select Star. This company's technology will expand Snowflake Horizon Catalog by integrating with databases, BI tools, and data pipelines. This will increase the context for AI agents such as Snowflake Intelligence. The full context of data assets is often scattered across upstream and downstream systems. This fragmentation makes it difficult to find the right data and understand the full context. In the AI era, this limited context poses a problem for both humans and agents.

Our industry is rushing headlong toward an AI-powered future. The promise is captivating: intelligent systems that can predict market shifts, personalize customer experiences and drive unprecedented growth. Yet in that race, many organizations are short-changing or even skipping a critical first step. They are building sophisticated engines but trying to run them on unrefined fuel. The result is a quiet crisis of confidence, where powerful technology underwhelms because the marketers don't trust the data it relies on.

Salesforce has completed its acquisition of Informatica. The CRM provider paid more than $8 billion (€6.9 billion) for the data management company. The acquisition is intended to lay the foundation for reliable AI agents within the Salesforce ecosystem. The completion brings Informatica's data catalog, integration tools, and governance services to the Salesforce platform. CEO Marc Benioff emphasizes the importance of this step: "You have to get your data right to get your AI right. Data and context is the true fuel of Agentforce."

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has published a request for information for private-sector contractors to launch a round-the-clock social media monitoring program. The request states that private contractors will be paid to comb through "Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, VK, Flickr, Myspace, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Reddit, WhatsApp, YouTube, etc.," turning public posts into enforcement leads that feed directly into ICE's databases.

In the UK, artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a buzzword reserved for tech conferences and research labs - it's an engine driving tangible transformation across industries. Healthcare, in particular, stands at the forefront of this change. From automating administrative tasks to accelerating medical research, AI is creating opportunities for both the public and private sectors to work smarter and more efficiently. A new era of intelligent healthcare solutions

As artificial intelligence transforms every industry, organizations are placing an increased focus on the quality of their data. The ability to generate value from AI depends not only on computational power or model sophistication but also on the trustworthiness of the data that underpins every insight, decision, and interaction. For Aon, the global professional services firm, this recognition is central to its enterprise transformation. For more than a century, Aon has served as an advisor to clients navigating complex and interconnected risks.

In England's schools, children are not only pupils but also data subjects. From the moment they are born, a digital record begins to take shape - one that will follow them through nursery, primary school, secondary education, and in many cases well into adulthood. What was once a matter of paper registers and filing cabinets has become a complex infrastructure of digital systems, databases, and analytics tools, managed by both the state and private companies, for AI, surveillance, and more.

You can't outsource accountability, but many organizations are doing just that, often without even realizing it. This is especially the case when it comes to data. As businesses rely more heavily on third-party suppliers to store, move, and manage their data, the risk of something going wrong multiplies. Whether that's compliance, the ability to restore lost data, or susceptibility to cyber attack.

Who controls the data? Every meeting should be captured, but not every recording needs to be shared. Use private meeting settings, control access permissions, and set retention policies that auto-delete after a certain number of days. Who needs access? The power of AI is capturing everything. The responsibility is controlling who sees what. Share broadly for team updates, narrowly for performance reviews, not at all for sensitive discussions.

Governments are increasingly relying on data-intensive systems, both to wage wars and to administer public services. These systems, increasingly provided by the same firms using similar tools, will come to affect our day-to-day lives whether we are in war zones or town squares. This is the era of Militarisation of Tech. The technologies that our governments rely on to deliver services and pursue their objectives are becoming increasingly data-intensive and militarised, which threatens our privacy, dignity, and autonomy.