Bringing Agents to Data: How Workday Architects Governed Agentic AI with Iceberg and Unity Catalog

Traditional "data-to-compute" models create latency and fragmented governance that hinder Agentic AI. To solve this, Workday and Databricks advocate "bringing agents to data" via the Databricks Lakehouse. By operating on data in situ, autonomous agents maintain real-time consistency without the risks of replication. This architecture enables reliable multi-agent coordination at scale while ensuring unified data integrity and reduced operational costs across the enterprise.The technical core uses Apache Iceberg for ACID transactions and snapshot isolation, providing a stable foundation for agent reasoning. Databricks Unity Catalog adds a unified governance layer, enforcing fine-grained security, lineage, and auditability. This production-grade approach significantly cuts query latency and storage expenses, allowing organizations to scale from single-agent pilots to hundreds of coordinated agents across multiple departments like, Customer Experience, RevOps, and Analytics departments.