Taking Care Of Data In The Agentic Age

InnovationAITaking Care Of Data In The Agentic AgeByJohn Werner,Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I am an MIT Senior Fellow & Lecturer, 5x-founder & VC investing in AIFollow AuthorJun 11, 2026, 12:14pm EDTDigital background depicting innovative technologies in (AI) artificial systems, neural interfaces and internet machine learning technologiesgettyWhen you talk to people who have responsibility for today’s systems, one thing that often comes up is data governance.Yes, parts of the world have new laws, like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR, not to mention the AI Act, but there’s still quite a big gray area in how companies, people and agents are going to treat personal information, in a world where we tried so hard to get guardrails on pre-AI systems.Simply speaking, much of our levee on private data is becoming obsolete. AI has new ways of ferreting out information, new attack vectors for black hats, new and scary bugbears of automation gone rogue. Just look at Mythos, a model that has essentially been put into a cage called Project Glasswing, because business and government leaders correctly surmised that it would be too dangerous to let this thing out unfettered into the world.With that in mind, I wanted to showcase some comments I heard in a panel at the Imagination in Action event at MIT in April (which I help put on) and how professionals are thinking about this issue. We had the esteemed Nina Gregory of NPR fame interviewing Moinul Khan of Aurascape and Sunil Ratan of Precognitive. In an initial discussion of data governance, Ratan weighed in on its importance, given that one of the company’s services is an AI entity he called a “guardian angel” for seniors who might need to coordinate a lot of doctor visits, home care, etc.‘We're not just integrating historical data, but current, live data about somebody as they're being monitored,” he said. “You can integrate all of that in...