Opening — Why this matters now Enterprises love to say they are “data‑driven.” In practice, they are database‑fragmented. A single natural‑language question — How many customers in California? — may be answerable by five internal databases, all structurally different, semantically overlapping, and owned by different teams. Routing that question to the right database is no longer a UX problem. It is an architectural one. ...
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. ...