Agentic MDM

About this book

Most MDM books begin with the golden record. This one begins with a harder question: what happens when software can reason about that record, challenge it and act on it?

Agentic MDM is structured as an architectural journey rather than a catalogue of AI features. It starts by rebuilding the foundations autonomous systems depend on (identity, relationships, hierarchies, quality, freshness, provenance and confidence) and introduces agents only after those foundations are explicit.

The book turns the problem in both directions: Agents for MDM, where agents help discover, match, enrich and steward master data, and MDM for Agents, where enterprise agents consume governed master-data context while making live business decisions.

At the centre of the architecture is one principle: an agent may reason about enterprise truth without automatically gaining the authority to change it. That principle becomes operational through Proposal → Policy → Commit, separating what an agent recommends from what policy permits and what the enterprise ultimately commits.

Asterion Industrial Group provides a recurring synthetic enterprise thread, so supplier identity, stewardship, runtime context, security, authority and governance decisions evolve across chapters.

Inside the book

• Part I — When the Golden Record Becomes the Starting Point: MDM redefined for machine action, and the Agents-for-MDM ↔ MDM-for-Agents dual loop.
• Part II — Building Agent-Grade Master Data: identity, relationships, quality, freshness, provenance, confidence and the Agent-Grade Master Data Contract.
• Part III — Agents for MDM: discovery, matching, enrichment and stewardship governed through Proposal → Policy → Commit.
• Part IV — MDM for Agents: trusted context at runtime through MCP, APIs, events and headless MDM.
• Part V — Trusting the Agent Enough to Let It Act: least privilege, evaluation, observability, evidence and auditability.
• Part VI — Putting Agentic MDM into the Enterprise: operating model, real-world evidence, failure patterns and a 90-day adoption roadmap.

An optional companion pack adds practitioner exercises, worked solutions, schemas, fixtures and governance artefacts.