Conflict of interest

This note concerns The Ontology Imperative, the series I write on governing agentic AI. From August 2026 I am Principal, Energy and Infrastructure at Graphwise, which sells knowledge graph and ontology software for grounding enterprise AI, the case the series argues. The argument recommends no vendor and depends on none.

The series is written in a personal capacity. It deals with standards, with what a company must be able to do, and with who is accountable for it. It does not rate or compare named vendors in the knowledge graph and semantic technology category, my employer included. When it says that software in this category can be replaced, that includes my employer’s.

One earlier document did compare vendors, the Vendor Coverage Diagnostic. It stays in the Reference Library as it was in July 2026, marked as no longer maintained, so that what I said before joining remains on the record.

Nothing from my employment goes into the series: no internal documents, no company wording, and nothing I know that is not public. Where an employer document rests on public sources, the series goes to those sources directly. The disclosure line at the end of every article, newsletter and post is the short form of this note, in the same words wherever it appears.

How the series is made

Every claim the argument rests on is checked against its original source: regulations on the official legislation sites, company statements on the company’s own pages, filings on the regulator’s site. A paraphrase of a summary is not a source. A person is credited with a view only after it has been checked against what they said or wrote. A claim that fails the check is cut. The number in my first post of 20 October 2025, a third party’s estimate given as Google’s count, was corrected in public on 20 October 2026.

Each piece is written for people who have to decide, not for specialists. The argument comes first, in plain words. The detail that supports it and the sources follow at the end, for anyone who wants to check.

Corrections are published in public on the same platform as the claim, dated and with their reasoning, never edited in silently.

Last reviewed 4 November 2026.