This article was co-authored by Don Henderson, Chief Technology Officer, and Chris Nobles, Division Executive of Mediant and appeared in The AI Journal on March 12, 2026.
The rise of AI has fundamentally redefined what business agility means—and what is required to achieve it. Along with the incredible new capabilities that AI unlocks, it also brings new complexities, uncertainties and risks that require companies to rethink how they strategize, utilize technology and manage their data. Simply moving fast in the face of change will no longer suffice. To succeed today, businesses need to move fast with foresight—before AI-driven change happens to them and catches them flat-footed.
What does it take to move fast with foresight? It requires a systematic approach to anticipating change and creating agility on multiple planes, infusing ready-for-anything flexibility into the foundations that allow AI to generate value safely, responsibly and continuously. While U.S. regulators have not yet issued comprehensive guidance akin to the sweeping change of the EU’s AI Act, stricter requirements for oversight and compliance are inevitable, and best addressed pre-emptively.
To stay ahead of change on an enterprise level, forward-thinking firms must foster:
A sound AI strategy starts with people—specifically, AI steering councils that convene technology leaders, compliance officers, data stewards and business executives to establish a common knowledge base and unified vision. These cross-functional groups are empowered to assess use cases, shepherd responsible development and respond quickly as operational risks, client needs or regulations shift.
Such steering councils must prioritize strong AI governance in every decision and action they take, so that new capabilities can emerge with the protection of thoughtful guardrails. Assigning clear roles and responsibilities (e.g., ethics officer, risk officer, compliance officer) is a critical task for operationalizing good governance, as is drafting clear AI policies and procedures that foster ethical use, monitoring and proactive reporting.
With those core tentpoles in place, firms can create a culture of AI literacy and innovation by promoting shared ownership and upskilling at scale. For example, some wealth and asset management firms now run AI innovation sprints, pairing portfolio analysts with data scientists for short, structured experiments using synthetic data. Others are deploying firm-wide AI literacy programs, enabling advisors, client service teams and operations users to experiment with copilots or workflow automation tools.
The goal is not to turn every employee into a technologist, but to build a workforce confident enough with AI to identify new opportunities, raise concerns early and pivot easily when conditions change.
As we turn our focus to the technology plane, we must remember that AI is not the answer to every problem. Rather, AI is a tool that can help us get to faster, better answers. If deployed well, AI can also serve as an accelerator for the ongoing modernization and transformation underway in the investment and wealth landscape.
Legacy, monolithic systems stall AI deployment by making integrations slow, costly and brittle. To counter this, many organizations are shifting toward cloud-native, microservices-based architectures that enable agnostic interoperability and “swap-ability”—allowing AI capabilities to be more easily plugged in, swapped out or scaled on demand.
Real-world examples are already emerging across the industry:
Even as firms dial up their technological agility and modularity, it’s essential that they prioritize traceability, security and resilience. Thorough documentation of every decision and deployment enables the explainability that both developers and regulators will seek.
As more vendors and partners come on board, governance and compliance protocols must extend to external AI providers to minimize third-party risk. Lastly, responsible enterprises must embed cybersecurity, access control and operational risk controls specific to AI.
At the foundation of every successful AI initiative lies data agility. AI thrives on clean, well-structured, governable data, and the firms that excel treat data as a strategic asset, not an operational byproduct. Data is also the lifeblood of regulatory compliance and reporting, making it doubly important to get its management and security right from the start.
With the high stakes attached, we believe success depends upon creating a meticulously mapped and pre-governed data infrastructure that enables explainability and rapid adjustments—in large part due to anticipatory metadata standards and comprehensive documentation. Increasingly, firms like ours are implementing:
These measures prove invaluable when new rules emerge. For example, new requirements for data retention and explainability can be addressed by reconfiguring data pipelines—without touching underlying applications or AI workflows—if strong metadata and lineage frameworks are in place. Or, if a state stipulates a specific definition of what counts as personally identifiable information (PII), the metadata structure can be easily adjusted to make the change holistically. What was once a major restructuring effort can now be a manageable configuration update.
The other benefit of building this flexibility into the data infrastructure is that it advances the state of data interoperability. Historically, it has not only been technology systems that have proved incompatible—very often, data sets tuned to different models or standards have caused breaks and headaches as well. Achieving agility through well-mapped, pre-governed data is a critical step in adapting to AI, new regulation and any other new demands that may emerge. At BetaNXT, we are helping our clients make the leap by modernizing our data models to absorb much of the burden—so firms can benefit from the change (with reduced risk and greater efficiency) while being abstracted from it.
Agility in the age of AI is no longer a single capability; it’s a three-part discipline integrating people, technology and data in a continuously adaptive framework. When a firm has cross-functional teams that can steer AI strategy, a modern tech ecosystem that supports flexible modularity, and data foundations that evolve ahead of regulation, it becomes truly agile.
Our team has been navigating an ever-changing regulatory environment for over four decades, and we’re well-versed in supporting compliance without sacrificing innovation. AI represents a new wave of exciting possibilities—not just greater efficiency, but sharper insights, more resilient operations and transformative client experiences. Agility today isn’t merely advantageous. It’s essential.
Source: The AI Journal