AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
How Denodo and Amazon SageMaker Deliver a Data Foundation for Agentic AI
By: Mitesh Shah, Global Director, Cloud Alliances and GTM – Denodo
By: Carl Luo, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
The race to production agentic AI has been dominated by model selection: which foundation model, which fine-tuning approach, which orchestration framework. But models are commoditizing fast. According to RAND Corporation, more than 80% of AI projects fail to deliver their intended business value. Gartner reports that 63% of organizations lack the data management practices required for AI. The real bottleneck is not the model. It is the data foundation. Without governed, real-time access to enterprise data, agents hallucinate, act on stale context, and fail to deliver business outcomes. The organizations that get agentic AI into production are solving the data problem first.
However, in today’s hybrid and multi-cloud data landscapes, secure access to the full data estate is constrained by compliance requirements, cost pressures, and technical debt. AI initiatives stall because data remains siloed, extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines introduce latency, and replication creates governance blind spots. AI agents cannot reason accurately when they lack complete, current context.
Denodo and AWS deliver a unified context-ready data foundation for agentic AI
To solve this, Denodo and AWS deliver a joint architecture that provides AI agents with governed, real-time access to enterprise data across hybrid, multi-cloud, and sovereign environments without requiring data replication. AI does not just need access to data. It needs the right information, with the right meaning and controls, at the moment it is needed. Denodo calls this “active context.” Unlike a single product integration or customer story, this post focuses on why the data layer, not the model, is the bottleneck, and how the Denodo and AWS partnership addresses it across financial services, healthcare, and life sciences, including a customer example from a multi-national bank.
AWS delivers enterprise-grade data and AI services: Amazon SageMaker as the center for data, analytics, and AI, including Amazon SageMaker AI for building, training, deploying, and managing machine learning (ML) models; Amazon Bedrock for foundation model access and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore for building, connecting, and operating agents securely at scale; and Amazon Quick for AI-powered research, business insights, and automation. These services enable enterprises to reuse components instead of building one-off stacks for each business unit.
The Denodo Platform on AWS establishes an AI data layer between distributed enterprise data and the AI systems, applications, analytics platforms, and people that consume it. It creates a reusable way to connect, govern, contextualize, and deliver data without requiring another consolidation or replacement cycle. This layer also includes unified semantics across the AWS and non-AWS data sources.
AI agents connect once and gain governed access to 200+ distributed data sources through zero-copy data access across AWS and non-AWS sources, standardized business definitions and metrics, and fine-grained security and governance controls. Together, the joint solution extends the reach of Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Bedrock, and Amazon Quick to data that resides outside of AWS: on-premises systems, sovereign clouds, and other cloud platforms.
Figure 1: High-level architecture – The Denodo and AWS joint solution for agentic AI
Solution capabilities
The Denodo solution, with integrations into AWS AI and data services, delivers the following:
A unified semantic layer with business context. The Denodo Platform standardizes business definitions, metrics, and relationships in a single shared layer across Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse, Amazon Redshift, Amazon S3, Amazon Aurora, and on-premises and multi-cloud systems.
Live data across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Operational and analytical data is accessible across the entire enterprise data estate without requiring replication. Denodo’s architecture enables AI agents to reason on live data across AWS and non-AWS systems, with connectivity to more than 200 enterprise data sources.
Governance and security across the data estate. Consistent security and governance are enforced across all data assets. Denodo governs non-AWS sources alongside Amazon SageMaker’s native controls for AWS data. Sensitive data is protected through fine-grained access controls, dynamic data masking, and end-to-end data lineage.
AI-ready data through standard interfaces. AI agents built on AWS AI services consume governed, real-time data with embedded context, lineage, and policy enforcement. Through Model Context Protocol (MCP), metadata embeddings, and text-to-SQL capabilities, Denodo transforms enterprise data into the active context that agents can securely discover and use.
How the solution works
The solution works across five layers, moving data from fragmented sources to intelligent AI consumers:
1. Unified data connectivity. Denodo integrates over 200 distributed data sources, including on-premises systems, multi-cloud environments, and SaaS applications. All enterprise data is accessible for AI reasoning without requiring data replication.
2. AWS data integration. Denodo integrates directly with native AWS data services such as Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Aurora. It provides a unified view across Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse and external systems through native connectivity to Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon EMR.
3. Amazon SageMaker Catalog synchronization. Denodo establishes a shared semantic layer that standardizes business definitions and metrics. It integrates with Amazon SageMaker Catalog, enabling metadata to be discoverable, and it provides the business context AI agents need to operate accurately.
4. Semantic layer and governance enforcement. Consistent security policies, including fine-grained access controls and dynamic data masking, are applied across non-AWS data sources. Denodo honors existing policies defined in AWS Lake Formation. Logical data products combine data into a shared semantic layer using Denodo’s no-code graphical interface.
5. AI consumption and orchestration. AI services consume this data through standard interfaces: API, MCP, ODBC, JDBC, and Python libraries. These services span agent orchestration (Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and Amazon Bedrock Flows), AI and ML (Amazon SageMaker AI), and AI-powered consumption (Amazon Quick). AI agents and workflows run real-time tasks and complex analytical queries with trusted, governed context.
Enabling AI-driven use cases across industries
Denodo and AWS deliver a scalable data foundation that powers agentic workflows across industries, from financial services and healthcare to manufacturing and retail.
Fraud detection and prevention
Denodo and AWS enable insurers to monitor claims, transactions, and behavioral signals in real time without copying data across systems. AI agents deployed on AWS access live, governed enterprise data to detect suspicious patterns earlier and adapt to emerging fraud schemes faster. Insurers reduce fraud losses through earlier detection, AI-driven anomaly identification, and autonomous actions.
Clinical decision support
Healthcare providers deliver real-time clinical signals, from diagnostics to medication history, to care teams at the point of care. AI agents use this context to surface insights faster and reduce the clinician burden. Denodo and AWS enable providers to improve patient outcomes while maintaining governance and security.
Drug safety monitoring
Life sciences organizations monitor adverse events across clinical, post-market, and partner data through zero-copy access to distributed systems. AI models and agents can access governed pharmacovigilance data to detect safety signals earlier and accelerate regulatory response.
Customer use case
A pan-African financial institution operating across 15 countries faced a data access challenge. Customer and transactional data were fragmented across dozens of applications spread across multiple geographies. Each integration project took months. Cloud costs were climbing because of constant data movement and duplication. Fraud detection was delayed because analysts waited for consolidated data extracts rather than acting on live signals. Regulatory reporting was manual and error prone.
The bank chose a logical data management approach over traditional lift-and-shift migration. With Denodo as the unified semantic layer and AWS as the cloud foundation, the organization connected its entire data estate without replicating it. Business applications and AI workflows connect to Denodo’s abstraction layer rather than underlying databases. This enabled backend migrations to AWS (Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, AWS Glue for cataloging) to happen without breaking downstream reporting or AI pipelines. Amazon SageMaker AI consumed curated data from Denodo to handle ML processing for fraud detection and regulatory use cases.
The results validated the approach:
- 4PB migrated to AWS in 3 months without disrupting downstream reporting or AI pipelines
- 70–90% reduction in integration effort
- 2M queries/month across 1,300+ users
- Faster fraud detection and decision-making
This case demonstrates why the data foundation, not the model, is what enables enterprise AI and ML to deliver at scale. The bank succeeded by first solving the data access and governance problem.
Delivering business outcomes
Organizations using Denodo and AWS can accelerate enterprise AI adoption:
- Faster insights. Real-time analytics and AI-driven decisions that previously took weeks.
- Cost optimization. Reduced data movement and duplication lower operational costs.
- Regulatory compliance. Governance, security, and sovereignty requirements enforced across all data sources.
Together, Denodo and AWS help organizations securely connect their entire data estate and power AI agents at scale.
Get started with Denodo on AWS
Denodo is the AI data layer company. The Denodo Platform powers trustworthy agents and applications, transforming enterprise data into reliable insights for analytics and self-service. Organizations worldwide deploy Denodo alongside their data lakehouses to deliver AI-ready, business-ready data in a fraction of the time—achieving up to 4x faster time to insight. Visit denodo.com. Denodo for AWS and Agora on AWS (Managed SaaS Offering) are available via AWS Marketplace.
Denodo – AWS Partner Spotlight
Denodo is an AWS Advanced Tier Technology Partner with the AWS Data Competency and the AWS Financial Services Competency.