Data Systems

Opening — Why this matters now Everyone wants an AI assistant that can answer business questions instantly. Fewer people ask the awkward follow-up: from what data, using which logic, and with what guarantees? The modern enterprise stack is not one neat database. It is a sprawl of SaaS tools, PDFs, spreadsheets, APIs, internal tables, web sources, and half-remembered user preferences. Yet many AI products still behave as if one LLM prompt and a pleasant tone can replace data infrastructure. ...

The Short of It LLM agents are about to become your busiest “users”—but they don’t behave like dashboards or analysts. They speculate: issuing floods of heterogeneous probes, repeating near-identical work, and constantly asking for partial answers to decide the next move. Traditional databases—built for precise, one‑off queries—will buckle. We need agent‑first data systems that treat speculation as a first‑class workload. This piece unpacks a timely research agenda and turns it into an actionable playbook for CTOs, data platform leads, and AI product teams. ...