Actian: Building Enterprise Data Foundations for the AI Era

AI projects fail at an alarming rate, and it’s not because of technology. Most companies are racing to implement AI while ignoring a fundamental truth: their data lacks the necessary quality, context, governance, and trust to power reliable artificial intelligence. Deploying AI on a shaky data foundation creates financial liabilities, regulatory risks, and reputational harm.

Actian CEO Marc Potter has built his company’s mission around solving this critical challenge. While others chase AI features, Actian transforms messy, fragmented enterprise data into trusted, strategic assets that enable confident AI adoption.

This emphasis on data intelligence builds on Actian’s long history of data management excellence, further cementing its position as an industry leader. Confirming its commitment to innovation and ease of use, the company’s flagship Actian Data Intelligence Platform earned Exemplary status in the 2025 ISG Buyers Guide for Data Intelligence, won an InfoWorld Technology of the Year Award for data management: governance, and was named Metadata Management Solution of the Year 2025 by Data Breakthrough.

Building Data Trust for the AI Era

The shift from being merely “data-driven” to truly “AI-ready” raises the bar dramatically. Enterprises are stalled today due to a lack of data trust that prevents confident strategic and AI-driven action. This unreliable data causes AI systems to amplify errors rather than deliver business value.

Actian provides the trusted data foundation necessary for real AI adoption, clearing the path for scaling innovation enterprise-wide. The Actian Data Intelligence Platform is a cloud-native SaaS solution that enables enterprises to quickly discover, trust, and activate their decentralized data assets, democratizing access to AI-ready data across the organization. It enables smarter data usage through metadata, governance and AI/automation, delivering data stewardship, data products, data contracts, cataloging, lineage, observability, quality, and enterprise data marketplace capabilities.

The Actian Data Intelligence Platform addresses the most pressing data challenges that large enterprises face today.

• Risk Management & Compliance: Ensuring appropriate controls for data privacy, security, and regulatory requirements (like GDPR or BCBS 239) while providing necessary audit trails and documentation.
  
  
• Data Trust & Quality:
  Establishing standards and processes to validate data accuracy, completeness, and reliability with semantic context, while checking quality continuously to enable confident decision-making and prevent costly errors.
  
  
• AI Readiness: Providing high-quality, contextualized data for AI/ML initiatives and enabling AI systems to discover and access data across organizational boundaries while maintaining governance.
  
  
• Business Value Optimization: Making well-governed data assets discoverable and accessible across the organization to drive innovation, accelerate time-to-insight, and transform data from a cost center to a strategic asset.

The solution is ideal for industries where speed, security, regulatory compliance, and  AI readiness are paramount, such as finance, manufacturing, and healthcare.

Central to the platform is its use of a federated knowledge graph architecture. This architecture captures complex data relationships, providing context about how information flows through the organization, enabling users to understand a dataset’s full history and transformations. This semantic context helps users and AI models truly understand the data to produce trustworthy, explainable results and take reliable business actions.

This transparency is coupled with “governance by design,” which uses a data contract-first methodology. This ensures data is properly documented and governed early in its lifecycle—from its origin to its consumption—promoting the accuracy and reliability businesses need. When combined with Actian Data Observability capabilities, the platform provides continuous, real-time insights into the performance and reliability of the data foundation, ensuring trust is maintained at scale.

The platform is designed for multi-persona deployment, with dedicated user experiences for data stewards and an enterprise data marketplace for business users to easily find and access ready-to-use data products.

We sat down with Marc Potter to discuss Actian’s strategic pivot, the urgency of data trust, and why user adoption drives every platform decision.

In conversation with Marc Potter, CEO of Actian

In the last year, Actian made a significant pivot toward Data Intelligence. Walk us through that decision. What customer demand or market reality drove that strategic shift?

Navigating a modern enterprise means managing highly distributed, dynamic, and diverse data systems. It’s a complex ecosystem that is only becoming more complicated. Maximizing the value of all this data can only be achieved by extracting actionable intelligence from these widespread assets.

We define data intelligence as a shift from simply cataloging assets (“What data exists?”) to ensuring data is strategically governed, contextualized, and prepared to enable responsible AI and sound decision-making.

The Actian Data Intelligence Platform is designed to simplify data complexity and deliver a unified solution so customers can discover, trust, and activate for AI. Implementing this solution allows organizations to leverage data to accelerate innovation and mitigate critical risk.

Importantly, we’re not just making data intelligence powerful—we’re making it accessible to the people who actually need to use it, including business users and AI agents. This pivot is about driving adoption through simplicity, not adding more complexity to an already complicated landscape.

Solving the problem of data trust is absolutely crucial right now. Why is this so urgent for business
leaders, especially as they pursue AI?

AI won’t solve data quality issues. Organizations are rushing to adopt AI only to discover their existing data quality issues are being amplified automatically and at machine speed. This is creating huge financial and reputational risks. The challenge isn’t the AI model itself; it’s whether companies can trust the underlying data powering the AI. As data becomes more and more decentralized, knowing where your data is, understanding its semantic context, and being able to trust it to power AI is critical. Without that foundation, you’re just building AI on quicksand.

For leaders who might view governance as bureaucratic and slow, why is governance by design actually key to moving faster with AI?

Governance by design is absolutely necessary to move fast with confidence when deploying AI. If you wait to apply governance after the fact, you hit a wall when you try to scale.

Actian’s approach ensures data is well-documented and governed from its source to its consumption, promoting accuracy and reliability from the start. In 2026, as AI is moving from pilot to production, companies need a strong governed foundation that can scale across their enterprise. The companies succeeding with AI are the ones who anticipated this challenge and built governance by design into their architectures.

Actian’s platform focuses on usability, making data intelligence accessible to business users and AI agents, not just technical teams. Why is this multi-persona approach so important right now?

The importance of unlocking data to business users as well as technical users and AI agents cannot be overstated. Expensive investments in tools with complicated capabilities are meaningless if the business users who need the insights can’t actually get to them. Data can’t just be locked away with technical teams anymore because business users and AI agents need direct access to make faster, more confident decisions.

Democratizing data access means people aren’t waiting for IT to pull reports; they can find, understand, trust, and use data themselves. Real ROI comes from widespread adoption across the organization.

When companies are evaluating AI initiatives, what is the first, most practical question you think they should be asking to ensure success?

The first question I ask about any technology implementation is: “Has this technology actually made your employees’ lives easier?” Most leaders start with vendor features or capabilities, but that’s a top-down approach. You need to start from the bottom-up, asking the employees how they would use the tool to improve their daily work. The reality is that complexity isn’t the problem—lack of adoption is. Success is ultimately measured by active usage and real business impact, not by how many features you bought.

Meet the leader behind Actian’s success

Marc Potter leads Actian as Chief Executive Officer, a role he stepped into in January 2023 after joining the organization in 2019 as Chief Revenue and Operations Officer. As CEO, Marc shapes the company’s strategic direction and product innovations, driving Actian’s mission to deliver data intelligence solutions that empower organizations to make confident, data-driven decisions.

Marc’s tenure has been marked by significant strategic moves, including the acquisition of Zeenea (an innovator in data catalog and governance solutions) and the subsequent launch of the Actian Data Intelligence Platform, the launch of Actian Data Observability, and the introduction of a next-generation edge computing database. These initiatives reflect his commitment to solving the complex data challenges facing modern enterprises.

Drawing on more than two decades of leadership in enterprise software and information technology, Marc has built Actian’s culture around an employee-first approach that emphasizes engagement, transparent communication, and ongoing professional growth. His leadership is defined by a commitment to understanding customer challenges and delivering technology that solves real problems—principles that continue to guide Actian’s evolution in the data intelligence market.

“The Actian Data Intelligence Platform builds trust by showing users exactly where their data originated and how it evolved. When you can trace that complete journey, you gain confidence in using it for critical decisions.”

“There’s a real data trust crisis happening, and you can’t AI your way out of bad data governance. Build your data foundation now, before you try to scale AI initiatives across the enterprise.”