Eventual Consistency | Your Reality Check on What's Actually Happening in Data

Your CEO saw the agentic analytics demo. Now someone has to make it work. Leadership wants an AI agent answering every data question, and the CFO is already counting the analyst headcount it will save. You're the one who has to explain what the demo left out. Ross Katz, Principal and Data Science Lead at CorrDyn, argues that an AI agent does an analyst's job without knowing what actually matters t...

Nvidia just paid almost $13 billion for a company with $150 million in revenue. That math only makes sense once you stop thinking about revenue. Every big AI acquisition headline feels urgent, but figuring out whether it changes anything about your data stack or your vendor risk is another matter entirely. Ross Katz, principal and data science lead at CorrDyn, works with data teams day to day on e...

AT&T runs 45 billion AI tokens a day, and open-weight models already handle a quarter of that load. If your business is burning through a frontier-model bill without knowing which tasks actually need frontier intelligence, you're leaving cash on the table every single day. Ross Katz, Principal and Data Science Lead at CorrDyn, works with data teams on exactly this problem: deciding what to bui...

Your data platform used to serve people. Now it has to serve agents too, and that changes what you build and who you hire. Two people ask an AI agent the same question and get two different numbers back, and neither can explain how their agent got there. That's the moment a data leader realises the platform wasn't built for this world. Ross Katz, principal and data science lead at CorrDyn, works w...

Prefect just bought Dagster. Two of the biggest names in orchestration are now one company, and the reasons go well beyond a slow grower getting folded into a faster one. If you're trying to work out whether your orchestration tool is about to get sidelined, or whether "agent governance" is really just a new label on an old data stack problem, this one's for you. David Yaffe is co-founder and CEO...

What happens when an AI agent's mistake can cost you the client, not just the demo. You've proven your AI agent works in a sandbox. Getting the business to trust it in production, with real customers watching, is a different problem entirely. Matthew Sekac is Head of Data & Analytics at Welocalize, where he has spent the past 18 months building an AI agent framework to handle the project manag...

Every major AI lab has just bought itself a consulting arm. Ross Katz explains why that is not a flex, it is an admission that the model alone does not create value. You have been told to "do something with AI" by year end, and now every systems integrator in the market wants the work. How do you tell a partner doing real engineering from one reselling a model licence with a nice deck on top? Ross...

Snowflake and Databricks held their flagship conferences within a fortnight of each other and both independently built their entire keynotes around the same claim: the bottleneck for enterprise AI is not the model, it is the context. When two direct competitors land on identical messaging at the same moment, the right response is to check the working. That's exactly what this episode of Eventual C...

The Big Four accounting firms are posting more job ads for AI specialists than for auditors. Graduate intake is down 30% at KPMG and 22% at Deloitte. Equity partners are being quietly demoted. The global chairman of PwC is telling the BBC he can't find the engineers he needs. The natural read is that AI is eating audit from the inside. In Episode 10 of Eventual Consistency, Jason Bradwell and Ross...

When AI can produce a ten-page analytics report, spin up a data pipeline, or generate a plausible infrastructure assessment in minutes, a question starts nagging at everyone running a professional services business: what exactly are clients still paying for? In Episode 9 of Eventual Consistency, Jason Bradwell and Ross Katz tackle that question from two different angles, Ross from the data service...

The 2026 dbt Labs State of Analytics Engineering report surveyed 363 data practitioners (not vendors, not analysts, but the people building and maintaining data systems). The headline finding is a tension that most people working in or alongside data teams will recognise immediately: AI is now embedded in daily data work, teams are shipping more and faster, and yet trust as a stated priority jumpe...

The threat isn't coming from outside your perimeter. It's already inside, embedded in the open source libraries your engineers pulled in last quarter, the routers running on your network, the security tooling sitting in your CI/CD pipeline. In this episode of Eventual Consistency, host James Winegar is joined by Jamil Bou Khair, founder and CEO of Firezone, and Brian Manifold, senior full stack en...

In March 2026, Digital Applied reported that Anthropic's Model Context Protocol had crossed 97 million installs in just 16 months, a faster adoption curve than most enterprise infrastructure standards ever achieve. OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft are all now shipping MCP-compatible tooling. What started as one company's open standard has quietly become the default interface between AI agents and the...

In early March, two major retailers made headlines with strategies that look like opposite bets on the future. Best Buy announced a partnership with OpenAI, opening its product catalog to ChatGPT and supporting Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, positioning itself to be discovered and purchased through AI agents, not just human browsers. Target, meanwhile, announced plans to open more than 30 n...

Every week brings another AI announcement, another data center project, another promise about what's possible with enough compute. But there's a constraint most people in tech aren't talking about yet - power. In this episode of Eventual Consistency, Ross Katz sits down with Mickey Peters, former energy executive and Vistage Chair, who spent decades running major power operations across South Amer...

Nearly $300 billion in market value vanished from software companies in a single week after Anthropic’s AI agent launch reignited fears of a “SaaSpocalypse”. In this episode of Eventual Consistency , guest host Jason Bradwell turns the tables and interviews Ross Katz about what’s really happening beneath the headlines. Is AI truly threatening the seat-based SaaS model, or is this another cycle of...

The era of AI experimentation without accountability is over. Following Davos 2025, where business leaders declared the end of pilot-purgatory after $1.5 trillion in AI investments, we dig into what "AI ROI" actually means for data teams. Matt Sekac from Welocalize shares how they have moved beyond demos to production AI across translation workflows, product development, and internal operations, a...

IBM is acquiring Confluent for $11 billion, and the data world is trying to figure out what it means. We cut through the press releases and LinkedIn hot takes to discuss what's actually happening here. Is this about mainframe modernization, hybrid cloud expansion, or IBM's bet on AI agents driving streaming adoption? We examine why IBM paid a 34% premium, what this means for the future of open-sou...

In this episode of Data BS, host James Winegar and Toby Mao, CTO and co-founder of Tobiko Data, discuss the development of SQL Mesh, insights from Toby’s experiences at Netflix and Airbnb exploring the innovative features of SQL Mesh, and the ability to promote data transformations to production seamlessly. Join us for a great conversation about how Toby co-founded his company and what’s next for...

In this episode of Data BS, James Winegar sits down with Nicole Radziwil, Co-Founder & Chief Data/AI Officer at Qzuku, to dive into the intersection of data, strategy, culture, and power within organizations. They discuss the crucial role of data teams in shaping decision-making, fostering alignment, and navigating power dynamics. Nicole shares valuable insights on how data professionals can d...

In today’s episode, James Winegar from Corrdyn and Alex Monahan, a Customer Engineer at MotherDuck discuss DuckDB, a powerful analytical database designed for performance and ease of use. They explore the unique features of DuckDB, its relationship with MotherDuck and DuckDB Labs, and the upcoming DuckDB 1.2 release, which promises significant performance improvements.  The discussion also covers...

In this episode, Lindsay Murphy, a Head of Data at Hiive and host of the Women Lead Data podcast, joins James Winegar to share her unique journey in the data industry, offering insights on building data-driven strategies, creating balanced teams, and fostering authentic connections.  From leveraging LinkedIn to understanding the strategic value of data, Lindsay breaks down practical advice for pro...

In this episode of Data BS, James Winegar sits down with Matt Barlow, a Cloud Infrastructure Lead from StratusGrid, to explore the transformative potential of generative AI in incident response, platform modernization, and cloud engineering workflows. They dive into practical use cases, discuss the challenges of integrating Gen AI tools into workflows, and address the implications for junior engin...

In this episode of Data BS, host James Winegar, CEO of CorrDyn, sits down with David Yaffe, Co-Founder of Estuary, to explore how their innovative approach to real-time data streaming is revolutionizing data pipelines. David shares how Estuary optimizes efficiency by leveraging streaming architectures, minimizing costs, and prioritizing smart resource allocation. They also discuss the importance o...

Listen to Part One of our interview with Kevin here wherever you get your podcasts - or find a link at the bottom of the Show Notes. *** In part two of this episode, we continue our conversation with Kevin Hartman, Head of Partner Solutions Architects in the Americas at Databricks and Lecturer at UC Berkeley. A visionary in the tech and data space, Kevin shares how his work at Databricks exemplifi...