Agentic AI systems autonomously plan and execute workflows, making them integral to modern enterprise operations. However, their autonomy creates significant risks – poor data quality and insufficient provenance analysis can undermine trust, compliance, and operational resilience. This Gartner report sets out why comprehensive, granular data lineage is now essential for any organization deploying AI at scale.
The Banking sector context
Data and analytics investment is accelerating. According to the 2025 Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Survey, 87% of banking respondents reported their enterprise would increase funding for business intelligence and data analytics in 2025. Yet a significant hurdle for achieving robust AI maturity in banking is often the current lack of foundational data maturity – underscoring the urgent need to prioritize investments in data and analytics alongside AI deployment.
(Source: Gartner, Hype Cycle for Data and Analytics in Banking, By Sudarshana Bhattacharya, 15 July 2025)
What this research covers
Data lineage — the comprehensive, auditable tracking of data from source to consumption — supports four critical outcomes for organizations adopting agentic AI:
- Trust and explainability – Detailed provenance records allow AI agents to validate decisions and provide explainable outputs, which is critical for fault detection, troubleshooting, and resilience, and optimization of execution trajectories.
- Regulatory compliance – Lineage supports audit readiness for mandates including the EU AI Act and BCBS 239, potentially reducing investigation times from weeks to hours by demonstrating that high-risk AI systems are trained on traceable datasets.
- Operational efficiency – Granular tracking enables real-time anomaly detection, where AI agents can automate quality checks to prevent “garbage-in, garbage-out” scenarios.
- Scalability – Active metadata and automated capture across diverse systems are required to maintain transparency in complex, multicloud environments ensuring data remains governable as it moves through the ecosystem.
