Why are enterprises spending so much time comparing AI models when their strongest competitive advantage may already be sitting inside their own data?

My guest today is Emma McGrattan, Chief Technology Officer at Actian. Emma argues that model choice is becoming less distinctive while data quality, shared business meaning, governance, and culture increasingly determine whether AI works in production.

We discuss why executives often rate data maturity more highly than the teams closest to the data, what changes when an autonomous agent becomes the consumer, and how data products and enforceable contracts can help organizations move beyond impressive prototypes.

Emma also shares a remarkable example of an expense agent approving a $300,000 spend through one thousand individually permitted transactions. If your organization is tryi ...