Why data governance must evolve for the AI era

Picture this: Your marketing team is using Power BI to analyze customer behavior. Your finance team is querying the same customer data through Excel. Your AI agent is pulling from both data sources to generate insights. Each tool has different definitions of "customer," different access controls, and different audit trails. 

When a regulator asks about personally identifiable information (PII) access or when your CISO or compliance team needs to investigate unusual data activity, you're stuck piecing together logs from multiple systems, hoping you haven't missed anything critical. By the time issues surface, organizations often face unnecessary exposure, cost, and regulatory pressure. The damage is done, and potential fines might follow.

This isn't a hypothetical scenario. It's the daily reality for data leaders trying to balance innovation with compliance, democratization with security, and speed with governance.

Strategy Mosaic Sentinel represents a fundamental reimagining of enterprise data governance, transforming it from a compliance burden into an intelligent defense system that works in real-time, across all your data platforms and tools. 

Instead of discovering problems months later during audits, Sentinel acts as an always-on guardian that: 

• Detects threats as they happen: Flags anomalies and sends alerts in near-real-time, not in days or hours, such as unusual PII access at 2 AM from an unexpected location. 

• Maintains unified visibility: Acts as the unified and context-aware governance layer across modern data clouds and BI tools, reducing the blind spots created by disconnected systems. 

• Provides automatic compliance: Runs real-time audit trails and automated GDPR reporting that satisfy regulators without slowing down business teams. 

Instead of discovering problems months later during audits, Sentinel acts as an always-on guardian that: 

• Detects threats as they happen: Flags anomalies and send alerts in near-real-time, not in days or hours, such as unusual PII access at 2AM from an unexpected location. 

• Maintains unified visibility: Acts as the unified and context-aware governance layer across modern data clouds and BI tools, reducing the blind spots created by disconnected systems. 

• Provides automatic compliance: Runs real-time audit trails and automated GDPR reporting that satisfy regulators without slowing down business teams.  

What makes Sentinel different from traditional governance tools or platform-specific solutions like Unity Catalog? Its core governance capabilities are designed for semantic intelligence. It understands not just that someone accessed data, but the business context and meaning of that access. 

When your CFO's dashboard shows "Gross Margin" and your AI agent responds to a question about "Gross Margin," Mosaic ensures consistent, governed definitions are applied wherever metrics are consumed, and Sentinel ensures it is governed by the same access controls and traceable through the same audit trail. This semantic awareness means your governance policies travel with the meaning of your data, not just the technical metadata. 

Sentinel's risk management goes beyond simple access logging. It establishes behavioral baselines for your users and data patterns, then uses AI to detect anomalies that indicate potential threats: 

• Sensitive data classification and monitoring: Automatic identification of Personal Information and Sensitive Data with real-time access tracking 

• Behavioral anomaly detection: Machine learning models that understand normal patterns and flag unusual access by role, time, or volume 

• Context-Aware event intelligence: Go beyond hard to decipher logs with event details enriched by user IDs, user groups, applications, and plain-language descriptions, turning alerts into immediately actionable intelligence 

• Compliance That Works at Machine Speed 

Meeting regulatory compliance requirements shouldn't require an army of data stewards manually tracking every data action. Sentinel provides: 

GDPR Compliance Automation: 

• Real-time PII access tracking with automatic field detection 

• Data subject rights support for "right to access" and "right to be forgotten" requests 

Provides automated workflows that help teams create compliance reporting that is designed to be automated, exportable, and audit-ready, giving regulators the transparency they need without creating bottlenecks for your data teams.

Traditional governance tells you what happened. Sentinel transforms governance from a cost center to a strategic asset. Sentinel tells you what matters:

• Model adoption tracking: Which semantic models drive the most business value? Which are underutilized and need promotion or deprecation? 

• Source-level analytics: Understand query volume and performance patterns across data platforms to optimize resource allocation 

• User segmentation: See how different roles and departments consume data to focus governance efforts where they matter most 

This isn't just compliance data. It's strategic intelligence that helps you prove ROI, optimize spending, and focus governance efforts where they'll have the most business impact.

Your AI is only as trustworthy as the data that powers it. As organizations rush to deploy AI agents, chatbots, and machine learning models, governance becomes the difference between your organization’s competitive advantage or catastrophic failure. 

Sentinel ensures your AI initiatives are built on a foundation of trust: 

• Governed data for AI models: Ensure models only access data that meets security, compliance, and quality requirements 

• Semantic understanding for AI: Provide the business context AI needs to avoid hallucinations and generate reliable insights 

• Traceable AI actions: Maintain auditable lineage from AI outputs back to source data and governance policies 

• Consistent AI behavior: Apply the same access controls to AI agents that you apply to human users 

When a regulator or customer asks, "How does your AI make decisions?", Sentinel provides clear, defensible answers backed by complete audit trails. 

The best governance is invisible. It protects without blocking, it ensures compliance without creating friction, and it scales without requiring exponentially more resources. 

Sentinel achieves this by: 

1. Automating the manual work: AI-powered classification, anomaly detection, and policy enforcement that significantly reduces governance overhead 

2. Unifying fragmented systems: One governance layer across all platforms eliminates the blind spots that create potential risks 

3. Providing actionable intelligence: Transform governance from reactive audits into proactive insights that drive business value 

4. Scaling with your data: Whether you have 10 models or 10,000, governance that adapts automatically without requiring armies of stewards. 

As data becomes more distributed, AI adoption accelerates, and regulations tighten, governance will increasingly determine which organizations can innovate safely and which are paralyzed by risk. 

The question isn't whether you need stronger governance. Recent breach costs and regulatory fines have answered that definitively. The question is whether your governance approach can keep pace with the speed of business and the complexity of modern data ecosystems. 

Sentinel represents a fundamentally different answer: governance that's proactive instead of reactive, intelligent instead of manual, and enabling instead of blocking. 

Because in the AI era, the organizations that win won't be the ones with the most data. They'll be the ones with the most trusted, governed, and intelligently managed data. 

Strategy Mosaic Sentinel launches in December 2025 as part of the Mosaic platform. Learn how Sentinel can transform your data governance from a compliance burden to a strategic advantage. 

Interested in seeing Sentinel in action? Contact your Strategy representative to schedule a demo, or join us at Strategy World 2026 for the full platform launch. 

References

1.  IBM Security. (2024). Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024. IBM Corporation. https://www.ibm.com/reports/data-breach