Data governance

Data governance is the set of rules and controls that decide who can see and use which data, and how. It covers access, definitions, quality, and compliance.

For an analytics agent, governance is not optional. The agent can write any query, so you need to control what it is allowed to see. A finance agent should not be able to read employee salaries it was never meant to touch. Governance sets those limits.

Why it matters for agentic analytics

An agent that ignores governance is a data leak waiting to happen. Strong governance lets a company give the agent to the whole business without exposing data the wrong people should not see. It works alongside context engineering, which decides what the agent knows, while governance decides what it can reach.