From Data Quality to Quality of Agentic Data Use: A Conceptual Framework for Agentic Data Engineering
Large language models and AI agents are extending data-engineering automation beyond isolated artifact generation toward end-to-end processes in which agents interpret requirements, select data, generate transformations, invoke tools, validate results, and communicate analytical outputs. This shift introduces risks that conventional notions of data quality and execution success do not fully capture. A dataset may satisfy established quality standards, and a generated query may execute without technical errors, while the agent still selects an incorrect metric, combines incompatible analytical grains, accesses unauthorized data, or draws conclusions that are insufficiently supported by evidence. This paper develops a conceptual framework for Agentic Data Engineering centered on Quality of Agentic Data Use, defined as the extent to which an agent uses and communicates data in accordance with task, semantic, quality, security, governance, and provenance requirements. An evidence-informed analysis of Data Contracts, Semantic Layers, Data Quality, Guardrails, AI Governance, and Data Provenance shows that these foundations provide essential but fragmented capabilities. The proposed framework integrates and extends them through four core artifacts: Agentic Data Contracts, Agentic Expectations, Agentic Data Provenance, and Agentic Data Governance. It also introduces an execution lifecycle, a reference architecture, a failure taxonomy, and a multidimensional evaluation framework. A governed sales-analysis scenario illustrates how the proposed artifacts interact throughout an agent-mediated data process. In addition, a controlled Databricks prototype and a complementary benchmark comprising 10 cases and 40 executions demonstrate the framework’s technical feasibility and support the independent computation of enforcement indicators. The benchmark highlights the value of separating generation from validation while also showing that the current validation and automated-repair mechanisms require further calibration. These preliminary findings do not establish generalized improvements in safety, correctness, or reliability. Rather, they provide an operational foundation for broader empirical evaluation of trustworthy agent-mediated data-engineering processes.