From the Traditional Data Catalog to the Agentic Data Catalog

A traditional data catalog is an inventory of an organisation's tables, dashboards, metrics and owners, written and maintained by people so that other people can look things up. This paper argues that the inventory goes stale for a reason that is arithmetic rather than cultural, and that an agentic data catalog replaces it by changing who does the writing. Agents record the estate as a byproduct of real work, and humans move from authoring entries to approving what the agents propose.

• The arithmetic, not discipline: a live estate changes faster than people can write about it, so coverage decays after every documentation push.
• Agents raise the stakes: a stale description that misleads an analyst costs an afternoon, one that misleads an agent with write access costs an incident.
• From inventory to control plane: the surface where a person approves, steers or reverses what the agents propose becomes the operational control point.
• The signature is the product: no agent can make metadata official without approval, and a service account does not count as a name.