Most enterprises build data architectures one layer at a time. Business, logical, and physical layers exist as separate artefacts owned by separate teams. That separation is the structural gap that makes data estates ungovernable.
Organisations debate batch versus real-time as if it is a technical preference. It is not. It is a structural mismatch between data freshness and decision cadence — and the mismatch is where the cost lives.
Decision velocity is not constrained by leadership intent but by architectural design. Governance systems built for slower eras create mechanical delay between insight and execution.
AI agents are making micro-architecture decisions in production. No ADR recorded them. No review board approved them. No architect ever saw them. Here is the structural fix.
MCP is classified as an AI integration protocol. It is actually a governance primitive — the stable interface layer that architecture fitness functions have been missing for years.