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Expert opinion

Azure OpenAI as a trusted partner

Sandipa Singh, Data Engineer

As someone who’s helped modernise enterprise data stacks across Snowflake, dbt, Power BI, and Microsoft Fabric, I’ve seen first-hand the excitement and hesitation that AI can bring. While the potential is enormous, especially with tools like Azure OpenAI, there’s one question that keeps surfacing - can we trust what AI tells us?

The Challenge

How do we integrate AI without sacrificing governance, traceability, or accuracy?

The rise of AI is inevitable - but without responsible integration, its value is limited. Enterprises need more than clever outputs; they need confidence that those outputs are grounded in reliable data, shaped by business logic, and monitored continuously. This makes the how of AI integration just as important as the what.

In highly regulated or complex industries like financial services and retail, trust is non-negotiable. A finance dashboard that uses generative AI summaries, for example, can’t afford to hallucinate. A retail sales prediction pipeline must be explainable, auditable, and secure.

In today’s environment, where misinformation, data privacy, and ethical risks are top of mind, trust is the real currency. And that trust must be built into the AI pipeline from the start.

The Business Impact

When AI is thoughtfully integrated into the data estate, it creates major value:

  • Decision velocity

    improves because teams have contextual, AI-generated insights embedded directly into their workflows.

  • Operational risk

    is reduced through built-in governance, lineage, and compliance controls.

  • Team efficiency

    increases when business users can ask questions and receive grounded responses - without needing to query SQL or wait for IT.

But without trust, these benefits stall. I've seen teams waste hours second-guessing AI outputs because there wasn’t a clear audit trail. Others have abandoned AI pilots entirely due to security or governance concerns. The cost of untrustworthy AI is lost opportunity.

Keyrus’ Approach

At Keyrus, we focus on aligning AI with the modern data stack - ensuring that trust, auditability, and performance are not afterthoughts.

Here’s how we make that happen:

  1. Governed Data Flow from Source to Output

    Leveraging Snowflake and dbt, we ensure every data point is traceable. With Azure OpenAI, prompts and completions become part of that lineage - integrated, not opaque.

  2. Semantic Clarity in Reporting

    We’ve migrated traditional Analysis Services models into dbt-backed Snowflake models. With AI embedded in Power BI or Fabric, users gain natural language summaries that reflect actual business logic - validated, not speculative.

  3. Responsible AI in Practice

    Just as we implement Row-Level Security using security groups, we build prompt governance and output filtering into Azure OpenAI integrations - ensuring sensitive data remains protected and AI outputs remain relevant.

  4. Continuous Monitoring and Feedback Loops

    Using Azure’s monitoring capabilities, combined with Keyrus’s analytics expertise, we treat AI not as a one-time deployment but a system that evolves. Outputs are tested, refined, and governed like any critical business application.

  5. Cost, Quotas & Performance Generative AI costs can escalate rapidly if uncontrolled. You need cost-management policies, token-quota alerts, and budgeting pipelines as part of your governance framework. Ensure you engineer SLAs for Azure OpenAI (e.g., availability, throttling behaviour) should be factored into your risk assessment.

Azure OpenAI as a reliable partner

AI can’t be trusted blindly - but it can be trusted by design. With the right data foundation and governance strategy, Azure OpenAI becomes more than just a powerful tool; it becomes a reliable partner in enterprise decision-making. Always be aware that you still need to design for mitigation of hallucinations, latency variability, quota errors and cost-management. The service isn’t fully “trustworthy”— trust must be engineered.

At Keyrus, we’re committed to helping organisations unlock the full value of AI - responsibly. If you're exploring how to bring trustworthy AI into your Microsoft Cloud ecosystem, let's start a conversation. Contact us at sales@keyrus.co.za.

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