Newsletters
Metadata Moves to the Forefront of Enterprise AI
Context Is Everything
Metadata is being repositioned as the control plane of enterprise AI. Not a feature. Not an add-on. But the substrate.
With Salesforce’s $8B acquisition of Informatica and ServiceNow’s recent move to acquire Data.World, “Governance” and “Metadata” now outpace the importance of “data integration” itself.
Marc Benioff’s quote is a clear tell: “Transparency, deep contextual understanding, and rigorous governance” — that’s metadata talk, not pipeline talk. The game is no longer about operational data plumbing. It’s about owning the context that makes AI useful.
Why Metadata Is the New Battlefield
There’s a fundamental shift underway:
| Before AI | Now (AI Native) |
|---|---|
| Data pipelines | Metadata pipelines |
| Data lakes | Semantic layers |
| Integration tooling | Contextual orchestration |
| ETL/ELT | Augmented governance |
| Analytics dashboard | AI agents that need context |
Enterprise AI can’t just read data. It needs to understand data.
That means knowing:
- Where it came from
- Who touched it
- What it means
- Whether it can be trusted
And metadata is the only universal language across fragmented enterprise systems that can provide that context.
A Hard Truth
Companies are waking up to the fact:
🔑 AI agents without metadata are just very expensive interns.
You can launch a flashy demo. But to sustain AI agents in production — across workflows, teams, apps, and compliance boundaries — you need:
- Lineage
- Access control
- Contextual enrichment
- Usage telemetry
- Semantic unification
That’s metadata infrastructure.
In essence, these acquisitions by Salesforce and ServiceNow aren’t just “add-ons” — they are existential hedges against irrelevance in an agentic future.
The Strategic Gameboard
Everyone’s playing the same game now:
| Objective | Strategy |
|---|---|
| Keep data in their ecosystem | Build native pipelines or storage |
| Keep agents in their ecosystem | Launch platform-native copilots |
| Keep control of the stack | Acquire metadata governance |
| Win the CIO’s mindshare | Position as end-to-end “AI platform” |
But here’s the paradox, as Prukalpa has nailed it:
🔑 The enterprise is only getting more fragmented. More apps. More clouds. More agents. More edge.
So if we try to lock the metadata inside of a proprietary ecosystem… we’ll break the very value metadata is supposed to provide.
- Yes. Metadata must be the control plane.
- And that plane must be open.
If we let every SaaS vendor wall off a garden of metadata for only their agents alone, then we’ll recreate the same fragmentation and shadow IT that buried BI in the previous generation.
Metadata Is the New Operating System
Just like cloud infrastructure required a unified orchestration layer (e.g. Kubernetes), AI workloads are demanding their own:
- A metadata layer that understands data across silos
- A governance layer that keeps agents safe, secure, and compliant
- A semantic layer that enables interoperability between humans, tools, and models
In short, we’re not entering into the AI era. We’re entering the metadata era that makes AI real.
Metadata is not a feature. It’s the foundation.
Let’s build!
