Why enterprises are turning to AI agents to rebuild data workflows
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Enterprises are under growing pressure to extract insights from data faster, even as data ecosystems become more fragmented and complex. Traditional data engineering methods are strained with diverse formats, legacy pipelines, and manual interventions, causing weeks of delay to deliver production-ready dashboards or analytics outputs.
While timelines vary by project size and complexity, we have seen mid-sized engineering projects taking about 3-6 months for implementation. However, about 66% of large-scale tech projects overrun on time and budget.1 These delays are driven by fragmented architectures, inconsistent data, lack of readiness, and resource constraints. As business needs evolve and data becomes more heterogeneous, traditional automation approaches built on predefined rules no longer hit the mark. Enterprises are thus turning to a more adaptive, intelligent solution– Agentic AI– autonomous systems that can reason, learn, and accelerate the data lifecycle without relying on explicit programming for every scenario.
How Agentic AI transforms the data engineering landscape
Agentic systems represent the evolution of AI in the enterprise data environment. Built on large language models (LLMs) and multi-agent frameworks, they bring intelligence and autonomy to data workflows. Unlike traditional automation tools that follow static instructions, these agents can understand schema semantics, infer data relationships, orchestrate workflows, and improve themselves through feedback.
By embedding these agents into the data lifecycle, organizations gain the ability to dynamically address ingestion, pipeline design, data quality, metadata enrichment, governance, and observability. Whether it’s detecting schema changes, resolving quality issues in real time, or generating transformation logic aligned to business goals, Agentic AI introduces a level of adaptability and responsiveness that static systems cannot offer.
What makes Agentic AI particularly impactful is its ability to serve as a virtual pair programmer for data engineers. Drawing from agile and extreme programming principles, agents collaborate with engineers to provide decision intelligence for designing and managing pipelines, suggest schema optimizations, auto-track lineage, and troubleshoot failures. This reduces operational overhead while improving speed, reliability, and data engineering outcomes.
Applications of Agentic AI within the data lifecycle
By introducing autonomous agents with specialized capabilities, Agentic AI empowers enterprises to build scalable, resilient, and self-optimizing data systems. Here are some of the high-impact applications across the lifecycle:
- Challenge: Conventional rule-based data quality checks often miss context-specific issues or fail to adapt to schema changes in data. Lineage tracking, too, tends to be outdated or incomplete, limiting visibility and traceability across pipelines.
- Value add: Agentic AI addresses these challenges with agents that continuously monitor for anomalies, interpret schema shifts, and automatically update lineage maps. These agents learn from feedback and improve accuracy over time, significantly reducing the manual burden of maintaining data integrity.
- Implementation example: A leading alcohol beverage manufacturer partnered with Sigmoid to deploy agentic AI for automating data quality checks and lineage tracking. Specialized agents validated file schemas, flagged anomalies, summarized risks, and generated actionable recommendations. By continuously learning from feedback, the system improved validation accuracy over time while maintaining traceable metadata across stages. This significantly reduced manual intervention with auditable data pipelines across the organization.
- Challenge: As data ecosystems grow, the number of datasets and reports multiply, often without a unified system to manage them. This leads to duplication, poor discoverability, and inefficient data use.
- Value add: Agentic systems streamline data product and platform management by enabling metadata enrichment, user role-based access, and intelligent search. These agents can automatically categorize datasets, infer data usage patterns, and surface relevant insights through conversational interfaces.
- Implementation: A global consumer health company partnered with Sigmoid to modernize its enterprise data platform. Intelligent agents were used to enhance metadata enrichment, enable intuitive data discovery, and reduce duplication across datasets. The platform also integrated reporting and catalog tools for seamless access. This agent-led approach improved data reuse, streamlined onboarding, and delivered a more efficient user experience across business functions.
- Challenge: In fast-moving data environments, even minor upstream changes can cascade into downstream pipeline failures. Traditional DataOps tools, often limited by rule-based triggers, fail to catch these issues early or provide actionable diagnostics.
- Value add: Agentic AI introduces self-healing agents that monitor pipelines in real time, detect anomalies, and take corrective action—whether by restarting jobs, switching to backup sources, or updating transformation logic. Observability agents also provide detailed diagnostics, helping teams resolve complex failures faster.
- Implementation: A leading infant nutrition brand partnered with Sigmoid to modernize its data operations using Agentic AI. Agents were deployed to monitor system health, classify issues by severity, and trigger automated resolution workflows. These agents proactively maintained uptime, reduced operational noise, and improved observability across complex data environments. The solution led to 70% faster issue detection, improved reliability, and a scalable model that significantly reduced manual intervention and overhead costs by 30%.
- Challenge: Master Data Management (MDM) has traditionally relied on rule-based matching and manual oversight to maintain accurate, consistent, and unified records across systems. However, as data volumes grow and source systems become more diverse, these legacy approaches struggle to scale or adapt.
- Value add: Agentic systems automate key MDM functions, such as detecting duplicates, resolving entity mismatches, and maintaining unified records across domains with minimal human intervention. LLM-powered agents can parse structured and unstructured inputs, understand semantic similarities, and continuously refine matching logic using feedback loops, resulting in high-accuracy master data at scale.
- Implementation: A global healthcare and life sciences company partnered with Sigmoid to automate master data creation from inspection documents and drawings. GenAI-powered agents extracted structured attributes from unstructured PDFs, standardized entries, and mapped them to LIMS-compatible formats. This reduced manual effort, accelerated validation, and improved consistency in golden records across systems, while laying the foundation for scalable, AI-driven master data management across labs and sites.
Operationalizing intelligent agents with AgentOps
As enterprises begin to embed AI agents across workflows, the need for AgentOps becomes critical. It is essentially the discipline of operationalizing and managing agentic systems scalably. Unlike traditional automation or standalone LLM deployments, agent-based architectures involve multi-step planning, memory retention, feedback loops, and tool orchestration.
AgentOps frameworks govern how agents are orchestrated, monitored, secured, and continuously improved, ensuring they perform reliably, align with business goals, and adapt over time without unintended behavior. This shift introduces new responsibilities for data and platform teams, from managing agent interactions and task decomposition to enforcing guardrails and ensuring observability at scale.
Adoption of agents across data workflows
The shift toward agentic systems is already underway. Major cloud platforms and hyperscalers are embedding GenAI into their data engineering workflows, making capabilities like natural language-to-ETL conversion a reality. This capability can assist in writing codes, detect schema mismatches, or recommend transformation logics, based on contextual understanding of the data and the business use case following natural language instructions. As natural language becomes the new interface for building with data, the technical barrier is minimized, development cycles are seamless, making data engineering more intuitive, and accessible.
At Sigmoid, we are actively deploying agent-based frameworks across the data engineering workflows. Early pilots have shown up to 30% reduction in time spent on tasks like data ingestion, pipeline creation, and operational oversight. With deep expertise in GenAI, LLM orchestration, and enterprise data systems, we are helping our clients build intelligent, scalable architectures where every data engineer is paired with an AI-powered collaborator, working smarter, and with greater agility than ever before.
References:
1. BCG, https://www.bcg.com/publications/2024/software-projects-dont-have-to-be-late-costly-and-irrelevant
About the author
Balaji Raghunathan heads Data & AI Engineering for New Accounts at Sigmoid. He has more than 25 years of Global experience in the IT Industry and has played varied leadership roles cutting across Business Technology consulting, IP Commercialization, Enterprise Architecture, Pre-Sales, and Delivery. With his extensive knowledge and experience in Digital Transformation, Data & AI Engineering projects, he helps enterprises in Retail, CPG, Manufacturing, and BFSI extract meaningful insights from data to drive informed decision-making.
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