Why CNA Insurance Started Its Agentic AI Rollout with Governance

CNA Insurance, a major U.S. commercial P&C insurer, had a data-trust problem: different teams produced conflicting versions of the truth, it ran eight separate BI tools globally, and lacked governance over third-party data investments. VP of Global Data Operations Erin McIntosh led a year-long modernization that consolidated the eight reporting tools into one unified BI platform across the US, UK, Europe and Canada, added traceability documentation for third-party data, built an AI-enabled reference data platform, and introduced 'agentic governance' -- AI agents handling stewardship, compliance interpretation and quality monitoring -- plus pod-based teams for rapid prototyping, prioritizing better decisions over merely faster automation. McIntosh said the intent is that 'while we'll have human in the loop, human on the loop... eventually the agents will be driving a lot of our governance,' adding that 'good data governance is actually effective. Bad data governance is actually slow and burdensome.'

Alation is a data-catalog and data-intelligence platform that tells a pharma team what data actually exists, who owns it, and whether it is trustworthy enough to support an AI use case.

This sits in the Design & Stress-Test stage of the AI use-case lifecycle: Named examples from the tools pharma teams use to scope, prototype and benchmark an AI use case before committing to build it — data-catalog, sandbox and evaluation platforms.