Why Agentic AI Needs a New Approach to Data Infrastructure

As AI agents transform how businesses access and process data, traditional siloed infrastructure is struggling to keep pace. In this episode of The New Stack podcast, recorded at AGNTCon + MCPCon 2026, Frederic Lardinois speaks with Bianca Lewis, Executive Director of the OpenSearch Software Foundation, about why unified, open source data infrastructure is becoming essential for agentic AI.

Lewis explains how OpenSearch is evolving beyond traditional search and observability into an AI data infrastructure platform that enables organizations to scale workloads, reduce costs, maintain data sovereignty, and avoid vendor lock-in.

The conversation explores how AI agents introduce new observability challenges, requiring organizations to monitor API interactions, trace agent behavior, and capture contextual data to improve accuracy and performance.

With production clusters nearly doubling over two years and a growing community of 3,500 contributors, OpenSearch is rapidly expanding its capabilities. Lewis also discusses the foundation's evolving commercial ecosystem, enterprise support programs, and the importance of community-driven innovation in shaping the future of AI infrastructure.

Learn more from The New Stack around the latest developments around agentic AI and data infrastructure:

Agentic infrastructure operations begin with accurate, reliable infrastructure data

The rise of agentic AI on Kubernetes: unleashing the new infrastructure layer 

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