From Functions to AI Agents: Reimagining the Lakehouse for an Agentic Future
The lakehouse promises a unified platform for analytics, ML, and governance. While modern catalogs offer unified governance, the same uniformity is still lacking both in the DX and in the underlying infrastructure.
Users must juggle multiple interfaces, mental models, and handoffs across different teams. What's missing is a set of simple, uniform ergonomics that make the lakehouse both human-friendly and machine-usable.
This matters now more than ever, because the next step for data engineering will be agentic automation. Real AI agents will not stop at writing queries: they will need to manage data and infrastructure together, automating ingestion, testing, and deployment. To do this safely, they require environments where every action is isolated, deterministic, and reproducible. Without that foundation, agents are either unsafe to trust in production or just a thin coat of paint on legacy stacks.
We argue that a function-based execution model, Git-for-Data semantics, and fully programmable abstractions are the way to make the lakehouse truly agent-ready. These primitives reduce complexity for developers today, and they provide the secure substrate that agents will need tomorrow to reliably operate end-to-end data workflows. The payoff is immense: a world where the routine, error-prone work of data engineering is automated, and teams can redirect their focus toward higher-value problems and innovation.
SPEAKERS
Ciro Greco: Founder and CEO at Bauplan, a serverless computing platform for complex data workloads. Developers can write complex, multi-language data pipelines with zero environment management and infrastructure configuration and the same instantaneous feedback loop as running code locally.
Formerly, he was the founder of Tooso, an NLP startup based in San Francisco. Tooso was acquired by Coveo in 2019 and Ciro was in the management team that brought Coveo to IPO in 2021.* *In a previous life he got a PhD in Neuroscience at Milan-Bicocca, a postdoctoral fellowship at Ghent University and he was visiting scientist at MIT.
Jacopo Tagliabue is the co-founder and CTO of Bauplan. Educated in several acronyms across the globe (UNISR, SFI, MIT), Jacopo was co-founder and CTO of Tooso, an AI startup acquired by TSX:CVO in 2019. He led Coveo's AI from scale-up to IPO, and built out Coveo Labs, a prolific R&D practice whose libraries, models and datasets have garnered tens of millions of downloads. When not busy building products, he teaches MLSys at NYU and explores topics at the intersection of data, infrastructure, and AI. In previous lives, he managed to get a Ph.D., do sciency things for a pro basketball team, and simulate a pre-Columbian civilization.