Malcolm Hawker

About

I spend much of my time on the problem underneath most data and AI failures: systems that have plenty of context but no governed truth to resolve it against. Over 25 years in data and analytics, most of it inside Master Data Management and Data Governance, I've worked with some of the largest enterprises in the world on exactly that problem. I'm the Chief Data Officer at Profisee, where I lead the global field practice for MDM and Data Governance. I host the CDO Matters podcast, where senior data leaders talk through what's actually working in data leadership right now. I'm also the author of The Data Hero Playbook (Wiley) and a former Gartner analyst covering this space before I moved client-side. Agentic AI raises the stakes on all of this. An autonomous system making decisions on your behalf still needs resolved, trusted data underneath it - a semantic layer that clarifies meaning isn't the same thing as master data that resolves identity, and conflating the two is where a lot of AI governance plans quietly fail. If you lead data or governance team, or you are trying to figure out where AI and data leadership actually intersect, that's what I write about here.