Operational data: Giving AI agents the senses to succeed

Presented by Splunk

Organizations across every industry are rushing to take advantage of agentic AI. The promise is compelling for digital resilience — the potential to move organizations from reactive to preemptive operations.

But there is a fundamental flaw in how most organizations are approaching this transformation.

We are building brains without senses

Walk into any boardroom discussing AI strategy, and you will hear endless debates about LLMs, reasoning engines, and GPU clusters. The conversation is dominated by the "brain" (which models to use) and the "body" (what infrastructure to run them on).

What is conspicuously absent? Any serious discussion about the senses — the operational data that AI agents need to perceive and navigate their environment.

This is not a minor oversight. It is a category error that will determine which organizations successfully deploy agentic AI and which ones create expensive, dangerous chaos.

Consider the self-driving car analogy. You could possess ...