Actian Targets Metadata Drudgery With Agentic AI
Manual metadata upkeep, a long-standing bottleneck for data governance teams, is the target of a new AI agent from Actian, the data and AI division of HCLSoftware.
The Actian Data Steward Agent is embedded in the Actian Data Intelligence Platform and is available now. It automates documentation, enrichment, classification and governance work across the data catalogue.
The agent writes and updates asset documentation as data pipelines evolve. It assigns ownership to orphaned assets and flags gaps in documentation. It also recommends classifications, including personally identifiable information (PII) and sensitivity levels, and maintains enterprise-wide glossary definitions and business terms.
Actian claims the agent covers the full scope of the data steward role, rather than automating isolated tasks in the manner of AI copilots. Suggestions are grounded in lineage, usage patterns and existing catalogue context. Human stewards retain final approval, reviewing and validating outputs rather than creating them from scratch.
The agent is built on the platform's federated knowledge graph, semantic layer, data products and data contracts. External AI agents connected via Model Context Protocol (MCP) or agent-to-agent (A2A) integrations can operate within the same governed business context.
Actian cited Gartner research finding that 51 per cent of organisations still rely on passive metadata practices. Gartner also reports data stewards typically have only 5 to 10 per cent of their time allocated to governance tasks, including cataloguing.
The launch reflects a broader push by data intelligence vendors to apply agentic automation to governance work. Consistent metadata becomes more critical as organisations deploy multiple AI agents that depend on shared definitions of enterprise data.
“As enterprises deploy interconnected AI agents across workflows, maintaining semantic consistency manually becomes operationally impossible,” said Guillaume Bodet, Chief Product Officer of Actian.
“The Data Steward Agent continuously aligns metadata, business definitions, lineage, and governance context so AI systems can operate from a shared understanding of enterprise data.”