Actian CEO Potter: AI driving a data governance renaissance

Actian CEO Marc Potter said AI is proving to be a wakeup call on data governance as companies realize it's a business imperative.

"Everyone has been talking about governance, but it has been more at a policy level and no one was enforcing it," said Potter. "There was a disconnection between data governance and reality. Because of AI, there's a reality check that data is not as good as companies thought. Data quality is getting real."

Potter's talk at Constellation Research's AI Forum 2026 came a few days after the company launched its Actian AI Analyst, which was the product of the company's acquisition of Wobby. Actian AI Analyst is designed to provide insights on analytics and data quality to reduce business intelligence bottlenecks.

• HCLSoftware’s Actian acquires Wobby, Jaspersoft as it builds out data platform
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Actian has been built with a series of acquisitions and is now focusing on organic growth and innovation. He said Actian is working on a next-generation vector database.

The Actian AI Analyst includes a conversational interface, a rules-based execution engine and full traceability.

Actian also launched a new Steward Agent to accelerate AI deployment with semantic modeling, consistent business logic and proactive logic management.

Potter said Actian AI Analyst is aimed at business users looking to have a conversation with data and get insights. "Business is where spend happens. A businessperson is going to want real-time insights and clean data," said Potter, who said data quality is what drives return on AI.

When speaking with corporate AI leads, Potter's advice is to "understand your data."

"The first thing you should do is really understand your data. It's blocking and tackling right now and everyone has jumped way over here and skipped all the steps they should have followed in the design phases," said Potter. "I would go back and really discover your data, tag your data, map your data, and once you understand that data, everything else is easier."

Potter said Actian customers all have different levels of AI and data maturity. "What we hear from customers right now is that it's a battle of semantic layers. Every product has its own context within that product, and they're all trying to build their own intelligent layer around that context, but there needs to become one layer that gives best context for that organization," said Potter.