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TDWI Virtual Summit

Modern Data Stack 2026: Tools, Trends & Transformations

January 28, 2026

Free Half-Day Event

Spotlight Talk: Production AI Starts with Orchestration, Not Models

January 28, 2026

Prerequisite: None

Steven Hillion

SVP AI & Data

Astronomer

If you are adding AI inference or AI agents to your data platform, you need quality data and operational context for the AI to act reliably. You need to know which tables to trust, whether pipelines are healthy, and how changes ripple through systems. Above all, you need to monitor how ML and AI are performing in production.

The solution isn't another tool. Orchestration platforms already capture the "second brain" of your data platform: design patterns, connections, dependencies, health signals, and tribal knowledge. This context is generated with every pipeline run—most organizations just aren't leveraging it for AI enablement. Investing in orchestration now future-proofs your agent platform through context that only an orchestration-first approach can provide, delivering both immediate ROI through reliable data delivery and strategic positioning as the intelligence layer for production-ready AI.