Introducing Foundational IQ

Today, Foundational announces the general availability of Foundational IQ, an agent framework that thinks, acts, and automates across everything governance. IQ is built on the Foundational Data Graph and designed to automate the workflows that enterprise data and governance teams perform every day and in particular address some of the hardest parts of data governance involving complex enterprise systems, legacy and undocumented code, sensitive data, and a lot more.

This is not another data Q&A chatbot that connects to your warehouse – Foundational IQ collects and maintains complete context of code and data across the entire codebase: Every transformation, dependency, and system across the full data estate. That depth of context, built on a deterministic lineage graph, is what makes it possible to automate governance workflows where otherwise extremely high accuracy is required. These types of efforts have always required manual effort, outsourced projects, or simply could not be completed at all.

Data and AI Governance, Powered by Agents

Traditional data governance tools were built around the data catalog - focused on the warehouse (and other SQL-based workloads). They see where data lands. They can describe what exists in production today, but they cannot tell you what’s underneath, where did that data originate, what business logic shaped it along the way, or what will break downstream if something changes.

Foundational IQ starts where data is actually defined. It reads source code across SQL, Python, Java, .NET, Spark, Scala, and many more. It traces every transformation through every pipeline and legacy system. It maps the full estate through the Foundational Data Graph, so every answer IQ gives is grounded in how your organization actually creates, moves, and uses data, not how it was documented to do so years ago.

That specificity is the difference between governance that is informational and governance that is actionable.

From Context to Action

Foundational IQ operates in two modes. Fast mode delivers immediate answers to governance questions. Thinking mode handles complex, multi-step analysis that requires a deeper understanding of the full data estate.

In both modes, every response includes references, code, and context so teams can validate the answer and move forward with confidence. IQ does not just answer questions. It completes tasks.

A few examples of what that looks like in practice:

Compliance. A BCBS 239 audit arrives with executive pressure and a short notice, requiring detailed lineage documentation that reflects how data actually moves through the organization at the field-level. IQ generates that documentation from always-current, source-code-derived data in hours, not weeks.

Privacy. A GDPR or CCPA data subject request requires knowing precisely where personal data lives and how it has moved across systems. IQ surfaces every table containing PII data across the entire estate in minutes, with full lineage back to source.

AI governance. An AI deployment is blocked pending compliance review. IQ traces feature data from origin through every transformation and produces the explainability documentation that regulators and internal compliance teams require, automatically.

Data engineering. A proposed schema change could have downstream consequences across dozens of systems. IQ surfaces the full impact before the change is deployed, so teams can act before problems reach production.

These are not edge cases. They are the governance workflows that consume weeks of engineering and compliance time at every enterprise that takes data seriously.

Secure by Design

Foundational IQ runs natively within existing enterprise environments, including Databricks, Snowflake, AWS, and GCP – and more are coming shortly! This ensures that governance workflows can execute within your own security perimeter and privacy boundaries, and only use approved LLMs. Data does not leave your infrastructure. Permissions and natively managed by the built-in catalogs.

IQ can also connect to the productivity and knowledge management tools your organization is already using: Teams, Slack, Notion, Google Drive, Office 365, Sharepoint and others, so that agents can interact with the people who need them without requiring a context switch.

One Source of Trusted Truth

The premise behind Foundational IQ is straightforward. Data governance and data management in complex environments require accuracy that is grounded in reality, has the right guardrails in place, and can be immediately connected to business outcomes. When an auditor asks where a number came from, the answer should not require a week of manual reconstruction. When a compliance team asks whether an AI model's training data meets regulatory requirements, the answer should not require a consulting engagement. Putting an up-to-date PII report together needs to happen in minutes – not weeks.

Foundational IQ has the broadest and most comprehensive context of any data governance tool available today. That context is what makes it possible to answer governance questions with the specificity, accuracy, and speed that enterprise organizations require.

Foundational IQ is generally available today as part of the Foundational platform. To see what IQ knows about your technology stack, request a demo.

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