SAP has expanded its Business Data Cloud with new data-fabric and master data management capabilities designed to give AI agents more reliable business context, while adding tools to help enterprises build and govern autonomous AI systems, according to a company announcement.

The capabilities were announced at SAP TechEd in Berlin on October 29, where the company also announced its acquisition of Reltio and made SAP Reltio generally available within Business Data Cloud.

SAP Reltio uses AI-based entity resolution to match and reconcile records across SAP and third-party systems, creating unified views of customers, suppliers, products and other business entities. 

That helps AI agents work from a consistent representation of the same entity rather than fragmented records with different identifiers and attributes.

Trusted Master Data Becomes Critical as AI Agents Gain Autonomy

For chief data officers (CDOs), SAP’s announcement highlights an increasingly important problem with enterprise AI: agents can only make reliable decisions when the data and business context behind those decisions are consistent.

As organizations deploy agents across finance, procurement, supply chain and other functions, CDOs will increasingly need to ensure that the data agents consume is governed, traceable and understood in context.

The developments also reinforce the relationship between AI governance and data governance. Controlling an agent’s behavior requires more than setting policies around the model itself; organizations also need to govern the data, business definitions and permissions that shape its decisions.