Powering Agentic AI_ Building Autonomous Data Foundations for 2026

Agentic AI marks a major evolution in enterprise artificial intelligence, shifting from passive analysis to autonomous systems that can reason, act, and adapt in real time. By 2026, AI agents are becoming embedded in core business operations, driving decisions, automating workflows, and coordinating actions across complex environments. This shift places new demands on data foundations, requiring them to be real-time, trusted, contextual, and continuously available to move AI from experimentation to measurable business impact.

• Agentic AI adoption is accelerating, with many enterprises reporting broad or full deployment plans and increased AI budgets.
• AI agents create new opportunities across industries, including healthcare, finance, and manufacturing, by managing data lifecycles and enabling predictive, adaptive operations.
• Key challenges remain, including data readiness, governance, scalability, and proving ROI as organizations move from pilots to production.

Ultimately, building autonomous data foundations is critical to realizing the promise of agentic AI. Unified access to structured and unstructured data, strong governance, semantic understanding, and resilient architectures enable AI agents to operate with confidence and scale, positioning organizations for sustained innovation beyond 2026.