Doris Summit 2026Day 1 · Keynotes

The Agentic Data Plane: Rethinking Database Connectivity for the AI Era

Kevin Shen · VeloDB / Ian Cook · Columnar

About this session

AI is changing not only how databases are used, but also how applications and agents connect to them. As workloads evolve from dashboards and traditional applications to agent-driven analytics, hybrid search, multimodal data, and AI runtimes, the connectivity layer is becoming a critical part of architecture. In this joint keynote, Apache Doris and Columnar will explore how database connectivity needs to evolve for the AI era — from Doris’s support for open, high-performance access through Arrow and ADBC, to the broader vision of an Agentic Data Plane, where MCP and tools provide the control plane, while Arrow and ADBC power the movement of data. Together, we’ll discuss what an open connectivity ecosystem could look like for the next generation of AI-native data systems.