The world of data is being reset by AI, and the infrastructure needs to evolve with it. I sit down with streaming legend Tyler Akidau to discuss how the principles of stream processing are forming the foundation for the next generation of "agentic AI" systems.
Tyler, who was an AI cynic until recently, explains why he's now convinced that AI agents will fundamentally change how businesses operate and what problems we need to solve to deploy them safely.
Key topics we explore:
- From Human Analytics to Agentic Systems: How data architectures built for human analysis must be re-imagined for a world with thousands of AI agents operating at machine speed.
- Auditing Everything: Why managing AI requires a new level of governance where we must record all data an agent touches, not just metadata, to diagnose its complex and opaque behavior
- The End of Windowing's Dominance: Tyler reflects on the influential Dataflow paper he co-authored and explains why he now sees a table-based abstraction as a more powerful and user-friendly model than focusing on windowing.
- The D&D Alignment of AI: Tyler's brilliant analogy for why enterprises are struggling to adopt AI: we're trying to integrate "chaotic" agents into systems built for "lawful good" employees.
- A Reset for the Industry: Why the rise of AI feels like the early 2010s of streaming, where the problems are unsolved and everyone is trying to figure out the answers.
