Opening — Why this matters now Enterprise AI has entered an awkward phase. On paper, frontier LLMs can reason, plan, call tools, and even complete multi-step tasks. In practice, they quietly break things. Not loudly. Not catastrophically. Just enough to violate a policy, invalidate a downstream record, or trigger a workflow no one notices until audit season. ...
“Every technical revolution rewires the old system—but does it fry the whole board or just swap out the chips?” The enterprise tech stack is bracing for another seismic shift. At the heart of it lies a crucial question: Can today’s emerging AI models—agentic, modular, stream-driven—peacefully integrate with yesterday’s deterministic data flows, or will they inevitably upend them? The Legacy Backbone: Rigid Yet Reliable Enterprise data architecture is built on linear pipelines: extract, transform, load (ETL); batch jobs; pre-defined triggers. These pipelines are optimized for reliability, auditability, and control. Every data flow is modeled like a supply chain: predictable, slow-moving, and deeply interconnected with compliance and governance layers. ...