Introducing CData Connect AI: Create Enterprise AI that Understands your Business

Today marks a pivotal moment in CData's journey — and I believe, in the enterprise AI landscape itself. We're announcing CData Connect AI, the first managed Model Context Protocol (MCP) platform that finally bridges the gap between AI's potential and the reality of enterprise data access.

After months of observing thousands of users embrace our beta MCP Servers, connecting hundreds of data sources to their AI assistants, one thing became clear: enterprises desperately need AI that can truly understand their business, not just process their words.

The $30 billion problem

MIT's recent research revealed that despite $30-40 billion in enterprise AI investment, 95% of AI pilots fail to deliver measurable business impact primarily due to challenges related to data access and governance.

I've seen this firsthand. Cutting-edge AI applications that can synthesize knowledge and reason through complex problems, yet they stumble when asked simple business questions like "What's blocking our Q4 pipeline?" or "Which customers are at risk of churning?" The AI isn't lacking intelligence — it's lacking organizational context grounded in business data.

Your sales data lives in Salesforce. Your support tickets are in Jira. Your financial records sit in NetSuite. Your AI assistant lives in isolation, unable to connect these dots because each system speaks a different language, has different APIs, and implements security differently.

The existing solutions for connecting enterprise data to AI fall short in critical ways. Third-party MCP servers are often built by unknown entities with questionable security and safety practices — hardly suitable for enterprise data. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) requires custom development for each data source and works better for unstructured content like documents rather than the structured business objects that drive enterprise operations. Custom-built integrations take months to develop, require ongoing maintenance, and create technical debt that becomes harder to manage as your data landscape grows.

Imagine walking into a meeting and asking your AI agent: "Show me how our Q4 sales performance compares to last year, broken down by region, and include any support tickets from our top 10 accounts." Within seconds, you get not just an answer, but a comprehensive analysis that draws from multiple systems, understands the relationships between the data, and respects every security boundary.

This is what becomes possible when AI has real-time, governed access to semantically-rich and contextually-aware enterprise data through a managed MCP platform.

Why Connect AI changes everything

Connect AI is the data infrastructure layer that makes enterprise AI intelligent about your business. It's built on CData's proven enterprise connectivity infrastructure that already powers integrations for companies like Palantir, Google Cloud, and Salesforce Data Cloud.  We've perfected the art of translating between enterprise systems and universal data access languages and Connect AI reimagines those capabilities for AI workloads.

Connect AI: managed enterprise MCP

Connect AI is the first managed Model Context Protocol platform that integrates AI assistants, agent orchestration platforms, AI workflow automation, and embedded AI applications with more than 300 enterprise data sources. It provides governed, real-time access to your business data while preserving all the contextual relationships and security controls that make that data contextual, meaningful, and safe.

The platform can be deployed in the cloud or embedded directly within software products with simple point-and-click configuration, giving you flexibility in how you implement AI-powered data access across your organization. Setup is very easy and many users can get set up in a matter of minutes, not weeks.

The benefits Connect AI delivers

Real-time Data Accessed In-Place: Connect AI accesses data where it lives right now, ensuring information is always live, always retains its metadata and semantics, and always protected by source system permissions. Rather than copying data into warehouses or staging areas, our platform maintains direct connections to your enterprise systems, eliminating the costs, delays, and inconsistencies that come with data replication. This approach means your AI is always working with the most current information while preserving all the rich context that makes that data meaningful for business decisions.

Semantic Data Intelligence with Preserved Data Context: Connect AI exposes your data's metadata, relationships, and context so AI has real understanding of your business without recreating it on top of a warehouse. Our platform preserves the intricate web of relationships that exist between different business objects. When AI understands that a Salesforce Opportunity connects to specific Contacts, Accounts, Activities, and Products, it can reason about your business at a sophisticated level that generic data access simply cannot match.

One Connection for AI to Both Explore and Take Action: Connect AI provides a unified infrastructure that works for both queries and actions, finally enabling true agentic workflows. Unlike other integration approaches that require one infrastructure for reading data and a separate infrastructure for actions, our platform provides a single connection point that enables AI to both analyze your business data and take meaningful actions based on that analysis back in those systems. This unified approach dramatically simplifies deployment while expanding what's possible with AI-driven automation.

Battle-tested Enterprise Security & Governance: Connect AI automatically passes through role-based access control (RBAC) inherited from the source to users in AI and AI systems. Every interaction respects the existing security framework you've already established in your enterprise systems, ensuring that AI never sees or acts on data that users shouldn't access. Connect AI can also layer on additional security beyond what the user can do directly to enable fine-grained control of AI. This inheritance model means you don't need to rebuild your security architecture for AI—you simply extend your existing governance to cover AI interactions, maintaining compliance and control at enterprise scale.

Embedding Connect AI for ISVs

We're also empowering ISVs to embed this capability directly into their products. ISVs can now offer their customers self-service integration between their data sources and agentic capabilities—giving AI agents the full semantic context of their users' businesses.

As a managed Model Context Protocol (MCP) platform, Connect AI offloads the management, build, and maintenance costs of AI connectors to a trusted and plug-and-play platform. Instead of every AI-native product reinventing the wheel by rebuilding their own connectors, embedded connectivity allows them to license industry leading connectivity from CData under the hood.

This white-label approach means the race for AI adoption isn't just about who has the smartest algorithms, but who can give their AI the richest understanding of each user's unique business context.

The AI revolution begins with better data access

When AI can access live data with semantic understanding and proper governance, it transforms from a productivity experiment into a trusted enterprise tool.

The future of enterprise AI is agentic, contextual, and intelligent about your business. It starts with giving AI the same rich understanding of your data that your employees have.

Connect AI is available today. Because the enterprise AI revolution doesn't begin with better algorithms—it begins with better data access.

Connect AI is immediately available at www.cdata.com/ai. Join thousands of organizations already transforming their AI capabilities with semantically-rich, governed data access. Curious about all the business systems and MCP integrations to AI that work with Connect AI? Explore more and learn here about every Connect AI integration.