The company’s new Connect AI Gateway provides improved AI productivity and governance and helps organizations answer the question: ‘Where is the expected ROI of AI?’
Data integration and connectivity tech developer CData has expanded the capabilities of its Connect AI platform, positioning it as the control point between AI agents and underlying enterprise IT systems.
The new CData Connect AI Gateway, an extension of the CData Connect AI MCP (Model Context Protocol) server the company launched in September 2025, provides a number of new capabilities
Connect AI Gateway is designed to help businesses and organizations whose AI initiatives are stalling due to high costs, less-than-expected ROI and productivity gains, and lack of AI visibility and governance, said Marie Forshaw, CData senior vice president of product marketing, in an interview with CRN.
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“A theme you hear in the market is that companies have very rapidly adopted AI and are now reaching the point where they’re saying, ‘Is this helping? Is this increasing my productivity? Where is the ROI of everything I’ve invested in AI?’ And a lot of organizations are coming up short, I think, on the answers to those questions,” Forshaw said.
Lack of AI visibility, observability and governance capabilities is at least part of the problem with the less-than-expected productivity, she said, because fearful organizations are limiting AI’s access to corporate systems and sensitive data.
“We see this as a way to go the last mile in terms of AI governance and in terms of connectivity for AI initiatives,” she said about the new CData offering.
CData, headquartered in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, provides data connectivity, replication and integration technology for breaking down data silos across cloud, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud systems. In addition to being sold as commercial products, the company’s technology is built into a number of other vendors’ offerings including Google Cloud and BigQuery and Palantir’s primary systems.
The 2025 launch of CData AI Connect marked the company’s expansion into the AI connectivity arena. This year the company built additional connectivity, context and control capabilities into that platform and debuted a free edition for AI developers.
The new CData AI Connect Gateway, part of the AI Connect Platform, is designed to give organizations a single control point for the models, tools, data and actions used by AI agents and the people who work with them, according to the company. The Gateway connects agents to enterprise systems through governed tools, applies company context at each step, enforces permissions, and routes requests to the most efficient model for each task.
“We can govern everything at every point on how that chain gets executed from the AI down into the source systems and then we have a log [record] of it,” she said.
A key addition to the platform is a “context engine” that gathers, creates and stores semantic definitions—such as business terminology, metrics and existing semantic models—for use by AI-guided processes. That provides Connect AI Gateway with the ability to better understand the schemas, objects, relationships and operations of an organization’s connected systems.
The context engine also includes a “self-learning loop” capability that continuously improves the context engine’s performance by making data corrections and changes to prompt patterns within agentic memory.
CData Connect AI gateway is currently available through an early access program.
