VMO2 uses data contracts to build scalable AI and data products

As organizations scale their data and AI capabilities, many are adopting federated data architectures to empower domain teams, accelerate innovation, and foster ownership. This decentralization is essential for building AI products that are adaptable and data-driven — but it also introduces new challenges: maintaining trust, ensuring data quality, and enforcing governance across distributed teams and systems.

At Virgin Media O2 (VMO2), in collaboration with Google Cloud, we’ve developed a robust and scalable approach to address these challenges: data contracts. These contracts serve as the data quality and assurance layer for our data products, ensuring that every dataset we publish is reliable, documented, and ready for consumption. Defined at the asset level, such as individual BigQuery tables or Google Cloud Storage buckets, data contracts are redefining how we manage and share data, enabling the creation of trusted and scalable AI products across our data mesh.

A data contract acts as a ...