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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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For fifteen years, observability lived downstream of everything else. Code shipped, something broke, an engineer went to the dashboards. The job was forensic. The pillars we built, such as logs, metrics, and traces, were designed for that role: tell a human what just happened, fast enough that they can make it stop. That role has quietly ended ...

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For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

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Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

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

For fifteen years, observability lived downstream of everything else. Code shipped, something broke, an engineer went to the dashboards. The job was forensic. The pillars we built, such as logs, metrics, and traces, were designed for that role: tell a human what just happened, fast enough that they can make it stop. That role has quietly ended ...

Hybrid IT has become the standard operating model for enterprises — but that companies are still looking for the right hybrid IT mix, according to the 2026 State of the Data Center Report from CoreSite. After years of cloud migration and hybrid adoption, organizations are shifting their focus from deciding whether to use cloud, colocation or on-premises infrastructure to determining which workloads belong in each environment ...

Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...