For 20 years the industry shipped governance programs nobody used. AI is about to make that history. I write about what that means for the tools, the org chart, and the people running the data assets of the next decade.
I'm Darian Worley. Most people writing about AI and data governance come from the AI side. I come from the governance side, the one AI is about to swallow. For 20 years I've built enterprise data capability from the ground up at Fortune 500 companies across media, distribution, and consumer goods. It's the foundation every AI program eventually needs and most don't have.
Along the way I've assessed hundreds of enterprise AI use cases and built the master data backbones they'd run on, including unifying customer data across dozens of acquired entities. I've led large teams and multimillion-dollar budgets. I hold an MS in Data Science from UC Berkeley (MIDS), I'm DCAM-certified through the EDM Council, and I'm a Six Sigma Black Belt.
The take I keep coming back to: the data steward role isn't dying. It's becoming the AI orchestrator. The person who sets the rules an agent runs against, then watches the metric move. Companies that figure that out in 2026 are the ones whose AI bets actually pay off. Everyone else is buying catalogs nobody opens. This site is where I think out loud about that shift, for founders building in the space, operators making it real inside enterprises, and data leaders who suspect their playbook is about to break. (Views here are my own.)
Using agents to do the stewardship, lineage, classification, and cataloging work that humans never finished. Where it actually works, where it breaks, and how to start.
The data steward role isn't dying. It's becoming the person who sets the rules an agent runs against. What that does to teams, tools, and the org chart.
Most enterprise AI rollouts fail at the data foundation, not the model. The gap between the hype and the backbone is the work I've spent 20 years on.
Published here first, then shared on LinkedIn.
"Data work doesn't deliver value, it just slows us down." That belief kills data programs. Here's the answer a CFO will fund. Publishing June 1.
A 10-minute diagnostic that predicts AI-governance readiness better than any vendor scorecard.
The wedge: AI won't improve governance programs. It will make them unnecessary, and the steward becomes the orchestrator.
Reach out if you're building a company in this space, running an AI-on-data-governance pilot and want a second pair of eyes, booking a speaker or podcast guest on AI for data governance, or you just want to argue with my POV. I read everything.