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Actian Launches Data Steward Agent

In a significant move for enterprise data management, Actian, the data and AI division of HCLSoftware, has announced the launch of the Actian Data Steward Agent. This innovative AI agent is embedded within the Actian Data Intelligence Platform, aimed at ensuring semantic consistency across AI systems, internal workflows, and third-party AI tools.

The Data Steward Agent automates the labor-intensive processes of metadata documentation, enrichment, and governance. By doing so, it accelerates value creation and minimizes the manual effort associated with building and maintaining AI-capable data foundations. According to Gartner, the majority of data and analytics leaders struggle to utilize metadata effectively, with over half of organizations relying on passive metadata practices that limit their ability to unlock business value.

Currently, the responsibility for maintaining and cataloging metadata falls heavily on data stewards, creating a bottleneck in operations. It’s reported that these stewards dedicate only a small fraction of their time—typically between five to ten percent—toward governance tasks, including cataloging. The introduction of the Data Steward Agent is set to revolutionize this landscape.

As more organizations integrate AI agents into their operations, maintaining consistent metadata becomes crucial. The Data Steward Agent is directly linked to catalog workflows, continuously updating metadata as data environments evolve. This means that as data characteristics change, the agent aligns these modifications in real-time, ensuring AI systems operate under a coherent context.

How the Data Steward Agent Automates Metadata Management

Unlike traditional AI copilots that focus on specific tasks, the Data Steward Agent employs an agent-based AI approach that encompasses the entire spectrum of data stewardship responsibilities. It observes the evolving data landscape and automates comprehensive data catalog tasks including:

• - Documenting and updating inventory documentation as data pipelines develop.
• - Assigning ownership rights to orphaned assets while highlighting documentation and ownership gaps.
• - Recommending classifications for personally identifiable information (PII), sensitivity levels, and scopes.
• - Creating and maintaining corporate-wide glossary definitions and business terms.
• - Identifying policy alignment issues before they impact downstream consumers.

Why the Agent's Suggestions are Precise and Governance-Friendly

The Data Steward Agent leverages natural language processing to formulate suggestions based on lineage, usage patterns, and existing catalog contexts, which enhances overall accuracy. Its outputs are compared against current data products and contracts within the platform to ensure consistency and compatibility. Data stewards can approve these suggestions by focusing on validation rather than creation, thereby maintaining rigorous control over data governance.

Guillaume Bodet, Chief Product Officer at Actian, underscores the significance of this development: "As companies deploy interconnected AI agents in their workflows, maintaining semantic consistency manually becomes impractical. The Data Steward Agent continuously reconciles metadata, business definitions, lineage, and governance context, ensuring AI systems function based on a shared understanding of corporate data."

Available now within the Actian Data Intelligence Platform, the Data Steward Agent provides semantic AI understanding, lineage, quality indicators, business context, and conversational analytics. This agent is designed for data stewards, data engineers, data analysts, and enterprise data leaders.

For further details on how to leverage the Data Steward Agent, please visit Actian's official page.

About Actian

Actian empowers businesses to manage and govern data securely at scale. Its data management and data intelligence solutions help optimize complex data environments and expedite the delivery of AI-ready data. Actian’s solutions are flexible, seamlessly integrate, and operate reliably in on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. Discover more about Actian at actian.com.