AI Agents of Chaos

Hi folks,

Good news—the AI agent revolution is upon us. Bad news—you might want to think twice about using them.

The truth is, apart from some fun experiments with your customer support chatbot, the accuracy of most AI agents are still hovering somewhere around 50% (or less). So, before we subject humanity to a future of ungoverned AI Agent Smiths (Matrix reference, anyone?), we need to think critically about how we actually get AI ready. IMO, this starts with your systems, processes, and of course, the data itself.?

If you’ve got agentic AI on the brain, read on for more insights on how to get your data in AI-shape this February and beyond.

• ?? The latest data quality tips for busy data leaders?
• ?? This month’s hot, medium, and mild takes on AI reliability, data engineering, and more
• ?? Info on upcoming events, like Gartner Data & Analytics Summit
• ??And our meme of the month (of course)

What’s new??

What we’re writing about:

• 4 AI Reliability Challenges for Enterprise Media Companies. You can’t refine gold without a little fire. We sat down with an enterprise media company to hear how they’ve handled their AI roadblocks—and what you can learn from their experiences.?
• Nasdaq’s Journey to Data Reliability: Curious how Nasdaq delivers trusted data to over 2,200 financial services companies? Michael Weiss, AVP Product Management at Nasdaq, shared the evolution of their data journey, how they collaborate with Amazon Web Services (AWS), and some of his best practices for implementing a data quality program at global scale.
• Monte Carlo Now Available As A Snowflake Native App on Snowflake Marketplace. We’re thrilled to share that Monte Carlo and Snowflake customers can now leverage the Snowflake Native App framework to achieve data and AI reliability natively on Snowflake.

What we’re talking about:

• The Illustrated DeepSeek-R1. Jay Alammar of Language Models & Co shared an interesting deep dive into how DeepSeek R-1 is revolutionizing language models, complete with some helpful visualizations.
• The Unstructured Data Landscape: What does the unstructured data landscape look like? And where will leaders find value in the future? Eric Flaningam of Generative Value shared his takeaways, including a visualization of the ecosystem.
• Creating the Data + AI Observability Category: Barr Moses, CEO & Co-founder of Monte Carlo, joined the Frontlines Podcast to discuss her path to creating the data observability category, including five key go-to-market lessons she’s learned along the way.

What’s hot? ???

We share one hot take, one medium take, and one mild take on what’s happening in the data space. Can you handle the heat?

• Hot: Traditional data quality isn’t ready for 2025. Junaid Effendi shared an illustration on Reddit’s r/dataengineering featuring a detailed map of the tools, concepts, and tech to know in today’s data landscape. But traditional data quality approaches only address the data in the data quality equation—and there’s a whole lot more to worry about in 2025.
• Medium: Agentic AI will be one of the top themes in data this year. According to Tomasz Tunguz, General Partner at Theory Ventures, agentic AI, scale-up architectures, and a great data consolidation will be among the leading data trends for 2025. Are you Team Agentic AI?
• Mild: Soon, AI models will be calling you “bae.” On a recent Saturday Night Live episode, AI models do everything from calling each other “bae” to dancing with 6 fingers. As they ask in the skit: "Isn't AI supposed to make things simpler?" Yes—but only if your data is ready. Right, bae?

Let’s meet up!

Every season is data events season – and that’s just the way we like it. Catch us here next:

• Gartner Data & Analytics Summit: Join Monte Carlo in Orlando March 4-6 to learn how leading data teams are leveraging data observability to get AI-ready in 2025. Check out the can’t-miss sessions, happy hours, and more.
• Serving Data: Philadelphia: Today! If you’re based in Philly and looking for some last minute plans tonight, be sure to join us for dinner and drinks tonight! You’ll also hear from Brian Taylor, Lead Technical Product Manager at Nasdaq, who will share how his team has been building data and AI trust with the right people, processes, and technologies. See you tonight!
• Serving Data: Toronto: We’re heading to Toronto on March 20 for our Serving Data dinner series! Relax, catch up with local data leaders, and discover how organizations like yours are driving trust and unlocking the power of AI for their stakeholders. Stay tuned for upcoming events in San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, Amsterdam, and more!
• Human[X] Conference: Attending Human[X] in Las Vegas March 9-13? Be sure to catch Barr Moses speaking on the Turning Data into Business Growth panel on March 12th at 1:15pm alongside speakers from Pinecone, Airwallex, Ada, and Runtime.

What we’re reading:

What’s better than data? Reading about data! Here are a few articles from across the industry that piqued our interest.?

• GetYourGuide’s Cost-Effective Journey to a Unified Data Warehouse. The Engineering team at GetYourGuide shared an in-depth look at their warehouse migration, including how they approached the proof-of-concept (PoC), and the results of the project.
• Data Pipelines Architecture at BlaBlaCar. Learn about BlaBlaCar’s data stack and how it’s evolved with their business, including a robust software development lifecycle (SDLC), version control for SQL, comprehensive code reviews, and automated testing for all deployments.
• Data Quality in Streaming: A Deep Dive into Apache Flink. The team at GetInData shared how they approach critical aspects of data quality, including completeness, uniqueness, timeliness, validity, accuracy, and consistency, and how to implement these within a streaming architecture.

Just for Fun

Not all heroes wear capes…

Stay reliable! Stay tuned for next month's edition.