As enterprises race to harness the transformative potential of AI, their ability to manage, govern, and activate data at scale has become a defining competitive factor. Yet, legacy data architectures—fragmented, rigid, and costly—are fundamentally misaligned with the demands of AI/ML workloads, real-time analytics, and rapid innovation cycles. The future belongs to organizations that can turn data into a system of intelligence—fueling faster decisions, smarter products, and more adaptive operations.

Data Debt Is Creating Business Risks

Most legacy systems were designed in an era where AI-powered analysis and instantaneous feedback loops were not the norm. Today, as we push toward real-time responsiveness and predictive insights, the gap between what businesses need and what their data estates can deliver has never been wider. In this whitepaper, we explore issues arising in traditional data management models like:

• Siloed data
• Slow decision latency
• Performance constraints
• Non-support for AI workloads

The Data Lakehouse Architecture

The data lakehouse architecture addresses these concerns in a 5-layer flow through:

1. The ingestion layer, which pushes data to the storage layer.
2. The storage layer, which is indexed by the metadata layer.
3. The metadata layer, which provides query-able index for the API layer.
4. The API layer, which exposes data to the consumption layer.
5. The consumption layer, which connects to the API layer for queries, models, and visualizations.

Driving AI and GenAI Innovation with the Data Lakehouse

As AI continues to be embedded across core business functions and products, data lakehouses play a central role by offering a unified platform that simplifies training, deployment, and governance, dramatically accelerating AI lifecycles. They enable transformation capabilities like:

• Streamlining data pipelines
• Fueling GenAI use cases, like chatbots and summarization tools
• Driving intuitive and intelligent semantic search
• Enhancing AI model development velocity
• Unlocking real-time and predictive analytics

Check out the full whitepaper to read more about these transformative possibilities.