AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data
Episode publishedPodcast: The a16z ShowThe a16z Show
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There is a new reason to have all your data in one place, which is AI agents need context. If you don't do that, then it's sort of like using ChatGPT from before ChatGPT was connected to the Internet. Postgres, contrary to popular belief, is very old technology. It is not a good database simply because it was written a long time ago and has a lot of technical debt.
Asatya has said that there's gonna be the collapse of SaaS. Do you think the SaaS apocalypse is a thing that we're gonna see a massive shift?
The bigger threat is that AI native companies will just zoom and catch up to the established incumbents and maybe be better.
Like, we'll actually have an HR, and that HR team will onboard AIs as they come. They'll be part of teams. They'll join the Slack. And in that world, these aren't software. That's actually more seats, more consumption of software. And so do you think that for enterprise agents, we're moving more to these, you treat them like humans, or do you think that that's twofold?
For years, companies built data infrastructure to answer questions about the business. Now, they're building it for AI. As agents become more capable, the challenge is no longer collecting data. It's making sure the right systems can access the right context at the right time. That shift is forcing companies to rethink everything from data platforms and APIs to enterprise software and systems of record. Martin Casado speaks with Fivetran cofounder and CEO George Fraser about AI, data infrastructure, and why the next wave of enterprise software may look very different from the last.
So our guest today is George Fraser, who is the CEO of Fivetran. Fivetran announced the merger with DBT. So maybe to start, just give a quick overview of what Fivetran does.
So Fivetran, we've been around for a while. We've been around since 2013, had customers since 2015.
2013?
Yeah. Fifteen years? Yeah. Exactly. I've been doing this long enough that a slide about the past state in my own slides is the same slide as the future state from when I started. But what Fivetran does is we help our customers get all of their data from all their systems like Salesforce, NetSuite, all their SaaS tools, their own databases into one place. Getting all your data in one place, it's not a new thing. Businesses have had the need to do this since filing cabinets. The primary reason historically that people use Fivetran to get all their data in one place was to do business intelligenc
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