Cloud warehouses, lakehouses, and the legacy on-prem estates they were meant to replace were all specified before autonomous agents, vector retrieval, and policy-aware tool calls existed. Bolt-on AI fills the gap with a parallel set of identities, ACLs, and audit trails — which is exactly how data leaves its governance envelope.

This guide is the vendor-neutral framework we use with CDOs replatforming for what comes next: ten capability domains, four widely-deployed approaches scored on the same scale, and twenty buyer questions that cut through the demo.