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Building AI Agents That Build Trust

Dominic Sartorio
Denodo

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption.

What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents?

Arlington Research explored the answer to this question by surveying 850 executives and business decision-makers who were responsible for sponsoring, designing, and/or running AI initiatives in organizations with over 1,000 employees.

When it comes to agentic AI, trust has many dimensions, but this research uncovered a powerful overarching theme: The most critical trust gaps relate to data, and these are gaps that can be overcome by adding the right capabilities to any existing data infrastructure; no rip-and-replace required.

In this post, I'll focus on three:

1. The data freshness gap. AI agents need access to live data across myriad data sources. 

2. The data relevance gap. AI agents need access to the right data for the given context, from authoritative sources.

3. The guardrail gap. AI agents need guardrails that effectively limit what they can "see" and do, continually enforced.  

The Data Freshness Gap

AI agents are being enlisted for demanding operational use cases such as dynamically re-routing shipments, mitigating fraud in real time, and balancing the load on smart grids in response to changing conditions. They need access to live data because yesterday's report is already out-of-synch with the current moment, and that's the moment in which agents need to operate.

The research confirms this, reporting that 66% of organizations say that AI data must be real-time or near real-time to be trustworthy. Unfortunately, many organizations are set up for analytics, not operational decision-making; their data management infrastructures are just not built to support the live data requirements of today's agentic AI use cases.

The Data Relevance Gap

More dramatically, AI agents are not trusted when they leverage the wrong data to support a given task. The research indicates that the average company draws data from over 400 sources for AI initiatives, and almost 20% draw from over a thousand. Organizations need to prepare their AI agents so that they can effectively choose the right one for each individual context. However, the research found that 63% of organizations struggle to identify and prepare trustworthy data for AI. This requires a properly configured semantic layer between the AI and the sources, but this hasn't been easy for many organizations to establish.

The Guardrail Gap

Finally, AI agents need to act within clear boundaries that define what data they can see and what actions they are allowed to perform. If organizations can ensure that their AI agents can be trusted to adhere to such boundaries, they can enjoy high adoption rates. Unfortunately, the research shows that 67% of the surveyed organizations struggle with AI data security and access controls, representing a wide trust gap.

It is relatively straightforward to enable strong data governance policies for a single data source, but the complexity rises considerably when the number of data sources increases, and the complexity compounds when the sources are heterogeneous and span on-premises and cloud systems.

Closing the Gaps

Fortunately, each of these trust gaps can be decisively closed by leveraging a logical data management layer alongside any existing data infrastructure. In contrast with traditional data management platforms, logical layers enable:

1. Live access to disparate data, without requiring replication

2. Universal semantics, providing a shared understanding of data across systems

3. Strong data governance and security protocols across diverse sources enforced at the point of access, for reliable agentic AI guardrails 

Dominic Sartorio is VP of Product Marketing at Denodo

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As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

Building AI Agents That Build Trust

Dominic Sartorio
Denodo

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption.

What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents?

Arlington Research explored the answer to this question by surveying 850 executives and business decision-makers who were responsible for sponsoring, designing, and/or running AI initiatives in organizations with over 1,000 employees.

When it comes to agentic AI, trust has many dimensions, but this research uncovered a powerful overarching theme: The most critical trust gaps relate to data, and these are gaps that can be overcome by adding the right capabilities to any existing data infrastructure; no rip-and-replace required.

In this post, I'll focus on three:

1. The data freshness gap. AI agents need access to live data across myriad data sources. 

2. The data relevance gap. AI agents need access to the right data for the given context, from authoritative sources.

3. The guardrail gap. AI agents need guardrails that effectively limit what they can "see" and do, continually enforced.  

The Data Freshness Gap

AI agents are being enlisted for demanding operational use cases such as dynamically re-routing shipments, mitigating fraud in real time, and balancing the load on smart grids in response to changing conditions. They need access to live data because yesterday's report is already out-of-synch with the current moment, and that's the moment in which agents need to operate.

The research confirms this, reporting that 66% of organizations say that AI data must be real-time or near real-time to be trustworthy. Unfortunately, many organizations are set up for analytics, not operational decision-making; their data management infrastructures are just not built to support the live data requirements of today's agentic AI use cases.

The Data Relevance Gap

More dramatically, AI agents are not trusted when they leverage the wrong data to support a given task. The research indicates that the average company draws data from over 400 sources for AI initiatives, and almost 20% draw from over a thousand. Organizations need to prepare their AI agents so that they can effectively choose the right one for each individual context. However, the research found that 63% of organizations struggle to identify and prepare trustworthy data for AI. This requires a properly configured semantic layer between the AI and the sources, but this hasn't been easy for many organizations to establish.

The Guardrail Gap

Finally, AI agents need to act within clear boundaries that define what data they can see and what actions they are allowed to perform. If organizations can ensure that their AI agents can be trusted to adhere to such boundaries, they can enjoy high adoption rates. Unfortunately, the research shows that 67% of the surveyed organizations struggle with AI data security and access controls, representing a wide trust gap.

It is relatively straightforward to enable strong data governance policies for a single data source, but the complexity rises considerably when the number of data sources increases, and the complexity compounds when the sources are heterogeneous and span on-premises and cloud systems.

Closing the Gaps

Fortunately, each of these trust gaps can be decisively closed by leveraging a logical data management layer alongside any existing data infrastructure. In contrast with traditional data management platforms, logical layers enable:

1. Live access to disparate data, without requiring replication

2. Universal semantics, providing a shared understanding of data across systems

3. Strong data governance and security protocols across diverse sources enforced at the point of access, for reliable agentic AI guardrails 

Dominic Sartorio is VP of Product Marketing at Denodo

Hot Topics

The Latest

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ...