Agentic systems are increasingly operating in agent-to-human and agent-to-agent scenarios, driving decisions and automating operations across the enterprise.
As these intelligent systems accelerate, Kevin Dallas, CEO of EDB, an AI infrastructure company, has a clear view of where the data infrastructure market is heading. EDB Postgres AI brings together a sovereign and open foundation, a unified platform for transactional, analytical, and AI workloads, as well as a low-code AI factory that lets teams build and deploy in days instead of months.
According to Dallas, there’s a global shift occurring that involves AI, data, and agentic systems. In this environment, data is the competitive moat, and the proximity, security, and governance of that data determine how effective these systems can be. Those getting it right are getting five times the ROI and doing twice the amount of agentic implementations compared to the rest. But they’re still the minority as only a small percentage has achieved this level of maturity, leaving a vast majority still pursuing an AI and data gravity model that ensures that secured and controlled data is available where, when, and how they need it. That’s what true AI and data sovereignty look like.
“Some regions like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Germany are well ahead on AI and data sovereignty, while others lag,” says Dallas. “But everywhere we look, enterprises now see sovereignty as the foundation of modern AI.”
The architect’s dilemma
In prior articles, we’ve explored why scaling AI is hard for CIOs and various best practices and recommendations to move AI into production-grade environments. Dallas’ take is leaders struggling with siloed data sprawled across systems, users, environments, and vendors is the biggest architectural challenge CIOs face when trying to move their AI pilots and projects into secure, scalable, and compliant production environments. They run pilots in isolated stacks, and when they try to scale AI, they hit such a broad range of inherited complexity.
So CIOs don’t have an AI problem, they have a data architecture problem. The shift happening now is that AI has to move closer to enterprise data, not the other way around. This requires a unified, governed data platform that can serve as the center of gravity for AI. Without that foundation, scaling AI becomes costly, risky, and slow.
At the center of the new architecture
EDB is known as a commercial contributor to PostgreSQL, or Postgres, and its database has long been valued by IT professionals for its robust open-source nature. But to understand how Postgres fits into this new AI-centric architecture, it’s important to understand, in the context of modern enterprise data architecture, how to build on its inherent strengths to meet today’s complex data demands.
According to Dallas, Postgres has always been a versatile data engine capable of handling both structured and unstructured data. In the emerging AI-driven landscape, fueled by LLMs like those from Anthropic, Claude, and OpenAI, Postgres has joined the conversation of context data and retrieval.
In EDB’s 2025 global research across 13 countries, 97% of major enterprises told them they wanted to build their own AI and data platforms. And one in four were already doing this on Postgres in a sovereign, controlled manner. According to Dallas, the market is moving from database to data platform thinking — platforms that are sovereign, secure, cloud-flexible, and designed to support transactional, analytical, and AI-driven workloads together.
Plus, there’s a new era emerging where AI gravity pulls compute to the data. That shift requires an extensible, open data foundation.
“I saw EDB’s opportunity to help customers run AI closer to their most critical data, with consistency across environments and without lock-in,” he says. “That’s an enormously compelling moment to lead the next phase of growth.”
At the intersection of AI and data sovereignty, research shows that nearly all enterprises want to become their own AI and data platform within the next three years, and EDB’s mission is to accelerate that ambition.
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Source: News