Leon Gordon

Enterprise data estates are where AI ambitions go to die.

The board wants Copilot, RAG, and agentic workflows. The estate can't carry any of it, fragmented governance, legacy pipelines, no semantic layer, and a "data strategy" that's really just a migration backlog. That's the gap where AI projects stall, budgets spiral, and leadership loses confidence in the entire programme.

I founded Onyx Data to close that gap.

Over 15 years we've built a practice of Microsoft-certified consultants and the Onyx Impact Framework, a governance-first methodology that defines outcomes before pipelines, builds semantic models before dashboards, and measures ROI like a product, not a project. Across global enterprise engagements it has delivered £93M in revenue growth, including an Elcome International and SpaceX deployment that went from concept to production in six weeks, recognised by Microsoft as a customer success story at Build and Ignite.

Then we built FabOps an AI-powered governance platform for Microsoft Fabric, on Azure Marketplace and Microsoft Co-Sell Ready. It's the control tower for Fabric estates: real-time governance scoring across eight dimensions, cost attribution, performance monitoring, and AI-powered recommendations that keep the estate governed as it scales.

The path is a ladder every step on Azure Marketplace:
• Strategy & Enablement — align your leadership team.
• 4-Week Fabric Accelerator — your first governed production workload, live.
• FabOps — keep it governed, continuously.

Every pilot that stalls before production has a price. I call it the Pilot Tax, and the fastest way to stop paying it is the Pilot Tax Assessment: a fixed-scope, two-week diagnostic that maps your path from stalled pilots to governed production. Start here: https://onyxdata.co.uk/pilot-tax-assessment

I also write The Pilot Tax, the newsletter on making AI ROI visible at board level: thepilottax.substack.com

5× Microsoft MVP · Oxford Saïd AI Programme alumnus · Forbes Technology Council member · Author of the LinkedIn Learning course, How to Build a Successful Data Strategy · Writing The Soul of the Machine: Nine Principles of AI Stewardship.