Summary In this solo episode of the Data Engineering Podcast, host Tobias Macey reflects on how AI has transformed the practice and pace of data engineering over time. Starting from its origins in the Hadoop and cloud warehouse era, he explores the discipline's evolution through ML engineering and MLOps to today's blended boundaries between data, ML, and AI engineering. The conversation covers how unstructured data is becoming more prominent, vectors and knowledge graphs are emerging as key components, and reliability expectations are changing due to interactive user-facing AI. The host also delves into process changes, including tighter collaboration, faster dataset onboarding, new governance and access controls, and the importance of treating experimentation and evaluation as fundamental testing practices. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data managementData teams everywhere face the same problem: they're forcing ML models, streaming data, and real-time processing through orchestration tools built for simple ETL. The result? Inflexible infrastructure that can't adapt to different workloads. That's why Cash App and Cisco rely on Prefect. Cash App's fraud detection team got what they needed - flexible compute options, isolated environments for custom packages, and seamless data exchange between workflows. Each model runs on the right infrastructure, whether that's high-memory machines or distributed compute. Orchestration is the foundation that determines whether your data team ships or struggles. ETL, ML model training, AI Engineering, Streaming - Prefect runs it all from ingestion to activation in one platform. Whoop and 1Password also trust Prefect for their data operations. If these industry leaders use Prefect for critical workflows, see what it can do for you at dataengineeringpodcast.com/prefect.Composable data infrastructure is great, until you spend all of your time gluing it together. Bruin is an open source framework, driven from the command line, that makes integration a breeze. Write Python and SQL to handle the business logic, and let Bruin handle the heavy lifting of data movement, lineage tracking, data quality monitoring, and governance enforcement. Bruin allows you to build end-to-end data workflows using AI, has connectors for hundreds of platforms, and helps data teams deliver faster. Teams that use Bruin need less engineering effort to process data and benefit from a fully integrated data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/bruin today to get started. And for dbt Cloud customers, they'll give you $1,000 credit to migrate to Bruin Cloud.Data migrations are brutal. They drag on for months—sometimes years—burning through resources and crushing team morale. Datafold's AI-powered Migration Agent changes all that. Their unique combination of AI code translation and automated data validation has helped companies complete migrations up to 10 times faster than manual approaches. And they're so confident in their solution, they'll actually guarantee your timeline in writing. Ready to turn your year-long migration into weeks? Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today for the details. You’re a developer who wants to innovate—instead, you’re stuck fixing bottlenecks and fighting legacy code. MongoDB can help. It’s a flexible, unified platform that’s built for developers, by developers. MongoDB is ACID compliant, Enterprise-ready, with the capabilities you need to ship AI apps—fast. That’s why so many of the Fortune 500 trust MongoDB with their most critical workloads. Ready to think outside rows and columns? Start building at