As data catalogs evolve to meet the growing and new demands of high velocity, unstructured data, we see them taking new shape as an emergent and flexible way to activate metadata for multiple uses. This talk discusses modern uses of metadata at the infrastructure level for AI-enablement in RAG pipelines in response to the new demands of the ecosystem. We will also be discussing Apache (incubating) Gravitino and it's open source-first approach to data cataloging across multicloud and geo-distributed architectures.