Tony Nicol has spent close to 20 years watching how major enterprises approach data. As a founder who built and sold one of Australia's leading data and technology consultancies, and now as the builder of an agentic AI company, he has seen three distinct eras: the plumbing era, the cloud era, and now AI.
His take is direct. Most enterprise AI projects fail not because of technology but because nobody is on the same page about what they are actually trying to achieve. And when AI does get access to your data without the right guardrails, as Tony puts it, it will absolutely go through your filing cabinet.
In this conversation with Richard Jones, VP Asia Pacific at Denodo, Tony gets into why governance is the real bottleneck, why risk reduction is driving more AI ROI than cost savings, why Australia is a faster mover than people give it credit for, why the CDO role is fragmenting into multiple specialised C-suite functions, and why his single biggest piece of advice for any C-suite leader right now is not about AI at all. It is about securing your perimeter.
