The advent of an insight and execution-driven organization has escalated the requirement for the design and construction of data and AI platforms to meet a broader set of use cases. The current desire for more stream-like data that operates continuously to harness the power of events and generate conceptual hydropower is now possible. It sounds great but is no easy feat as organizations’ disparity in repositories and systems is well beyond the data warehouse and data lake challenges of recent years to the data operations for orchestration in managing pipelines. How an organization establishes not just the data and AI platforms but the governance, security, and sovereignty through catalogs and virtualization can help build a path to a digital future that starts today.