A New Playbook for the Agentic AI Era – Introducing Manish Sood’s New Book, Agentic Intelligence
AI is beginning to do more than generate answers. It is now being trusted to initiate workflows, recommend decisions, and take action across the enterprise. Yet many organizations are building these systems on data that remains fragmented, outdated, and difficult to trust.
That challenge is at the heart of Agentic Intelligence: Strategy at the Speed of Data, a new book co-authored by Reltio Founder and CEO Manish Sood and Venkat Venkatraman, Professor Emeritus at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business and a leading authority on digital business strategy. Publishing September 15, through Forbes Books, the book offers business leaders a practical framework for building the data foundations, enterprise architecture, and operating models required to compete in the age of agentic AI.
Why Manish Wrote the Book
Manish has spent more than two decades helping enterprises make sense of fragmented, siloed data — first shaping master data management (MDM) strategy at Informatica and Siperian, and then founding Reltio in 2011 to give organizations a modern, cloud-native way to unify their most critical information. Over and over, he saw the same pattern: companies weren’t held back by a lack of data, but by data that was scattered across disconnected systems and impossible to trust or act on quickly.
That problem hasn’t gone away with the rise of AI — it’s become more urgent. As enterprises move from AI that simply analyzes data to agentic AI that acts on it, the cost of a broken data foundation multiplies. An agent built on messy, unreliable data doesn’t fix the mess; it accelerates it. Manish saw an opportunity, and an obligation, to help business leaders understand what it actually takes to get this right before handing more decisions over to autonomous systems. That conviction is what led him to write Agentic Intelligence with Venkat, translating years of hands-on experience and academic research into a practical playbook rather than another book of AI predictions.
About the Book
Agentic Intelligence argues that a lack of information doesn’t hold back most organizations, but slow, scattered data that’s impossible to use when decisions are on the line. Through ten clear, actionable rules and real-world examples, Manish and Venkat show how companies can retire outdated systems, unify their data, and give humans and AI agents a shared, trustworthy foundation to work from together as what the authors call “coagents.”
The book has already earned praise from a who’s-who of enterprise technology leaders, including Jo-ann dePass Olsovsky (former CIO, Salesforce and BNSF Railway), Mihir Shah (former CIO & Head of Data, Fidelity Investments), Shamim Mohammad (EVP, Chief Information & Technology Officer, CarMax), and Douglas Laney (author of Infonomics), among others.
About the Authors
Manish Sood is the Founder and CEO of Reltio, a context intelligence company that helps organizations unify and act on their data in real time. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he has spent more than two decades helping enterprises modernize their approach to data and decision-making.
Venkat Venkatraman is Professor Emeritus at Boston University and a leading authority on digital business strategy. He previously taught at MIT Sloan and London Business School, and is the author of The Digital Matrix and co-author of Fusion Strategy.
Mark Your Calendar
Agentic Intelligence: Strategy at the Speed of Data ships September 15 and is available for preorder now wherever books are sold, including Amazon, Google Books, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org. Manish and Venkat will be exploring the ideas in the book, along with more news here on the Reltio blog, as well as on the Forbes Author Voice blog posts.
Congratulations to Manish and Venkat on this milestone — we can’t wait for you to read it.
