In this AI Intelligence Lab, NetApp’s Andy Sayare, Senior Director of Global AI Alliances, and Domino’s CMO Thomas Bean talk about what it takes to do AI in industries like life sciences, financial services, and defense. Domino focuses on helping these organizations design, test, deploy, and operate AI and data-driven applications, while NetApp brings the secure, compliant data infrastructure underneath. Together, they target outcomes like faster drug discovery, fairer financial products, and mission-critical decision support in government and defense.
Moving from models to long‑lived AI agents
Thomas notes that many customers have been strong at experimentation and training, including with GenAI, but struggle with the “last mile” of inference and long-term operations. Enterprises now want durable AI agents that can serve thousands of internal users and customers, regardless of where the underlying data sits. The joint NetApp–Domino stack uses a hybrid architecture so teams can train on the most critical, governed data and then deploy models and agents wherever they need them—on-prem, in the cloud, or both. That scale-out capability is key to turning prototypes into production systems that actually move business metrics.
Governance, choice, and control by design
For regulated industries, trust and compliance are non-negotiable. NetApp keeps enterprise data fully governed and policy-controlled, while Domino gives teams flexibility to use and combine the large language models they prefer, calling external models or running them directly inside Domino. Customers retain fine-grained control over which data and models are used, how they’re paired, and where inference runs, without worrying about latency or data access paths. With NetApp’s latest governance features, the two companies can jointly prove that AI applications comply with regulatory and internal requirements at both creation time and during operations.
Real traction in highly regulated sectors
Andy highlights that several of the world’s largest banks and pharmaceutical companies already rely on NetApp and Domino together for AI that passes regulatory muster. These customers are accelerating adoption of AI agents and applications because they finally have the right combination of infrastructure, governed data, and lifecycle processes. The conversation closes with a look ahead: the alliance has been growing for nearly five years, with more capabilities on the roadmap aimed at letting enterprises do more with less while staying safely inside the compliance lines.
Explore More of the AI Intelligence Lab
In our final episode, Episode 6, we take a look at a customer case study: what challenges they faced, why they chose NetApp + NVIDIA, and the impact the solution had on their business.