)
Data Mesh Without the Mess: How Southern Company is Governing Data Products and AI at Scale
Southern Company has no shortage of data. The harder challenge is making that data trusted, governed, and usable across business units, operating companies, and a growing set of analytics and AI use cases. As demand increased, domain teams needed faster access and more ownership of their data, while enterprise teams still had to maintain security, consistency, lineage, and compliance.
In this session, Southern Company will share how it is making the data mesh approach practical at enterprise scale. We will cover the operating model for domain-owned data products, how governance is built into the Lakehouse architecture, and how consistent metadata, discovery, fine-grained access, lineage, and auditability are supported across more than 10 domain-based Lakehouses spanning the enterprise and its subsidiaries.
The session will focus on the real decisions that made the model work: what to centralize, what to federate, how to onboard domains, how to reduce shadow and duplicate datasets, and how to create a trusted foundation for self-service reporting, advanced analytics, and AI/ML/Agents use cases without losing control.
Attendees will leave with practical lessons and design patterns to scale governed data products and AI across a complex utility enterprise.
