Hi Community,
We just published an ebook on AI and data context. It explains why AI agents need to know how data is actually used, and how a data product marketplace can give them that information. Here are the main points.
Key takeaways
- Agents lack the knowledge experienced colleagues have. A finance analyst knows a legacy system runs two days behind the data warehouse. An HR director knows a survey with a 90% response rate is more reliable than one with 10%. An agent acts on the data without this knowledge, and small misreadings add up quickly when it works autonomously.
- A semantic layer standardizes definitions. Interpreting a metric correctly also depends on who asks, which system produced it, how fresh the data is, and which policies apply. That extra information is what the ebook calls context.
- Context covers many dimensions: time, location, relationships to other data, quality, purpose, permissions, business definitions, and provenance.
- Context changes all the time. A customer leaves, an employee changes role, a policy is updated. The context an agent uses must be as current as the decision it makes.
- Agent-ready data rests on three pillars: connectivity (MCP, APIs), business value (data products agents can pick based on usage), and a context layer.
- A marketplace builds context from two sources. The first is what already exists: schemas, glossary, metadata, owners, licenses, access rules, lineage. The second is usage signals: who the users are, their roles, what they search for, what they consume, and whether they are satisfied. Every interaction, human or AI, updates this context.
- In Huwise, context comes from features you already use: built-in analytics and lineage, the business glossary and product page metadata, documentation and content entered by users, and user attributes retrieved through SSO. When two similar datasets exist, usage data tells an agent which one the business uses and trusts.
Tell us in the comments which signals you check today to decide which dataset to trust, and if you have started connecting your portal to AI agents !