On data products, contracts and the new economics of trust

Data products are forcing a new contract between teams.

Conversation

The strongest data leaders are moving away from centralised request queues. They are defining data products with consumers, service levels, documentation, lineage, and economics that make reliability visible.

Trust has to be renewed every day.

Operations

Teams trust data when incidents are handled openly, schema changes are communicated early, and consumers can see whether a product is healthy. This is operational work, not taxonomy work.

The AI platform inherits every unresolved data decision.

AI readiness

LLM and agentic systems surface data quality issues faster than dashboards do. Data contracts become the fastest path to safe retrieval, better evals, and more defensible automation.