The Metadata Problem Nobody Talks About: Context, Catalogs, and the CDO's Next Land Grab | CDO Matters Ep. 103

Every organization is told they need context for AI to work. Almost none of them know where to start. The answer has been sitting in their metadata all along — but most CDOs haven't connected those dots yet.📌 In this episode:Why your data catalog is already a source of context — and how to expose it to agentic workflows todayThe semantic layer problem: definitions living in BI tools instead of governed catalogs, and why that creates riskWhy engineers and library scientists think about language completely differently — and why that gap matters for AIMalcolm's argument that CDOs are in a unique position to make a "land grab" on unstructured data before someone else does💬 The takeaway: "CDOs are in a unique position to make a land grab: the ontologists, the taxonomists, the library scientists are all over the organization without one single leader. That's your moment." — Malcolm HawkerAbout the host + guest: Malcolm Hawker is a former Gartner analyst, Chief Data Officer at Profisee, Editor-in-Chief of CDO Matters, and host of the CDO Matters Podcast. Ole Olesen-Bagneux is Chief Evangelist at Actian and O'Reilly author of Fundamentals of Metadata Management (2025) and The Enterprise Data Catalog (2023) — the practitioner's reference for anyone building or governing a data catalog.Subscribe to CDO Matters Monthly → https://profisee.com/cdo-matters-community/#join-community Follow Malcolm on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/malhawker/Guest Ole Olesen-Bagneux → https://www.linkedin.com/in/ole-olesen-bagneux/