Preparing Your Data Lakehouse for the EU AI Act: Auditable Lineage and Data Provenance Requirements

This article discusses the technical implications of the EU AI Act for data platforms, emphasizing the need for auditable lineage and data provenance in high-risk AI systems. It argues that compliance requires operationalizing trust through open table formats, catalog metadata, semantic layers, query logs, access controls, and agent-facing tool contracts. The piece provides guidance on building a data foundation where evidence of data origin, transformations, and AI workflow consumption is generated as part of normal operations, rather than after-the-fact paperwork. It highlights the importance of data contracts, security for AI agents, and human oversight hooks, offering a practical readiness checklist for organizations using lakehouse architectures.