When an agent generates a query from the schema alone, it binds to the column name, not the steward’s definition. A misleading name used to be a nuisance a new hire tripped over once. Now it’s a hazard that ships the wrong number every run.
Every governance program is built to add definitions and none of them can retire one. In a regulated shop that gets worse, because the instinct to keep every record gets misread as a ban on ever deprecating a definition. They’re different objects.
The whole agent-reliability project is trying to engineer the one thing a tool can’t have: accountability. Data governance already named this. The agent is a custodian, and we keep trying to promote it to owner.
The samples post ended on seating a data steward. This is what you build around that seat in a regulated life sciences org: the roles you actually need, the order to do it in, and why the regulation is the only budget argument that ever works.
Someone asked how many samples we have and three systems gave three different numbers. The dependency order behind vocabulary, ontology, semantic layers, catalogs, and contracts, and why the piece everything stands on is a role most orgs never seat: the data steward.
Enterprise data strategy has moved its destination from ‘break the silos’ to ‘vectorize everything.’ The step in between is the layer that makes vectors actually work, and it’s the one most roadmaps quietly skip.