Autonomous Data Products for the Autonomous Era: Rethinking Data Architecture for GenAI

Description

Zhamak Dehghani, Founder & CEO, Nextdata. As enterprises scale their deployment of Generative AI (Gen AI), a central constraint has come into focus: the primary limitation is no longer model capability, but data infrastructure. Existing platforms, optimized for human interpretation and batch-oriented analytics, are misaligned with the operational realities of autonomous agents that consume, reason over, and act upon data continuously at machine scale.

Abstract

In this talk, Zhamak Dehghani — originator of the Data Mesh and a leading advocate for decentralized data architectures — presents a framework for data infrastructure designed explicitly for the AI-native era. She identifies the foundational capabilities required by Gen AI applications: embedded semantics, runtime computational policy enforcement, agent-centric, context-driven discovery. The session contrasts the architectural demands of AI with the limitations of today's fragmented, pipeline-driven systems—systems that rely heavily on human intervention and customized orchestration. Dehghani introduces autonomous data products as the next evolution: self-contained, self-governing services that continuously sense and respond to their environment. She offers an architectural deep dive and showcases their power with real-world use cases. Attendees will learn the architecture of "data products 2.0", and how to both use GenAI to transform to this new architecture, and how this new architecture serves GenAI agents at scale.

Key Takeaways

• Understand why data infrastructure, not model capability, is the new bottleneck for GenAI at scale.
• Learn the foundational capabilities required for AI-native data architectures: embedded semantics, runtime policy enforcement, agent-centric discovery.
• Contrast the needs of autonomous agents with the limitations of current, human-centric, batch-oriented data platforms.
• Discover the concept of autonomous data products: self-contained, self-governing, and continuously adaptive services.
• See real-world use cases and an architectural deep dive into 'data products 2.0' for the GenAI era.