As enterprises scale their deployment of Generative AI (Gen AI), a central constraint has come into focus: while large language models and the infrastructure to support them are the focus of intensive investment fueling a remarkable stream of innovation, data management approaches and infrastructure depend on out-of-date assumptions that are stopping progress.
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.
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.
Speaker
Zhamak Dehghani
Founder & CEO @Nextdata, Data Mesh Founder, Author, Speaker
Zhamak Dehghani is a pioneering technologist, author, and thought leader known for creating the Data Mesh paradigm and the concept of Autonomous Data Products, implemented by Nextdata OS. Her work has redefined data architecture by promoting decentralized, domain-oriented infrastructure that treats data as a product.
Born in Iran, Dehghani holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Software from Shahid Beheshti University and a Master’s in IT Management from the University of Sydney. With over two decades of experience as a software engineer and technologist, she has contributed to multiple patents in distributed systems.
As Director of Emerging Technologies at ThoughtWorks, she introduced Data Mesh in 2018. Today, she is the founder and CEO of Nextdata, a software company providing a scalable, federated platform for Autonomous Data Products. Dehghani is also the author of Data Mesh: Delivering Data-Driven Value at Scale, O’Reilly Media, 2022, and co-author of Software Architecture: The Hard Parts, O’Reilly Media, 2021 and a frequent keynote speaker worldwide.
