Your data belongs to you. That sounds obvious, but for decades it hasn't been true in practical terms.

Databases coupled everything together, making analytics painful and scaling nearly impossible. Warehouses separated storage from compute but locked data in proprietary formats you couldn't read without the vendor's engine. Lakes gave you open formats and engine choice but crumbled without ACID guarantees.

Each evolution solved one problem and revealed the next. The lakehouse is the culmination of decades of innovation. Open table formats deliver ACID transactions, schema evolution, and time travel on open storage. Open metadata ensures any compatible engine can reach your data. The result: flexibility, interoperability, and robust systems, exactly what AI demands.

This talk traces that evolution and shows why the lakehouse isn't just another architecture. You'll learn how open standards on both sides of the pipeline (ingest and consumption) keep your infrastructure vendor-neutral, AI-ready, and built to evolve as fast as the landscape around it.