How do AI agents safely access the data they need without exposing the business to risk?

In this episode, I speak with Alex Gallego, CEO and founder of Redpanda, about why streaming data is becoming such an important foundation for enterprise AI. Redpanda began as a high-performance streaming data platform, but the company is now building what it calls the Agentic Data Plane, a governed access layer designed to connect AI agents with enterprise data and systems.

Alex shares the story behind Redpanda's journey, from solving a personal engineering frustration to powering mission-grade systems for some of the world's largest organizations. We discuss why many enterprises are racing toward agentic AI while still lacking the permissions, controls, context, and observability needed to make agents safe in production.

One of the standout moments in our conversation is Alex's comparison between hiring AI agents and forgetting to onboard them. Businesses are deploying accounting agents, coding agents, customer success agents, and security agents, yet many still lack a reliable way to decide what those agents can access, what actions they can take, and how to prove what happened when something goes wrong.

We also talk about explainability, agent transcripts, and why enterprises need a full record of agent behavior across complex chains of activity. Alex explains how this matters in regulated sectors such as banking, where organizations may need to prove that an AI agent is acting helpfully and responsibly, and in manufacturing, where a faulty agent action could affect months of production.

Alex also shares Redpanda's work with NVIDIA Vera, where benchmarks showed 5.5 times lower latency and 73% higher throughput. For business leaders, that means faster systems, lower costs, better customer experiences, and the ability to monitor agent behavior in real time.

This conversation is a practical look at what enterprise AI needs next.

Speed matters, but governance, trust, and control may decide which companies can move AI agents from experiments into real operations. So, are we ready to give AI agents access to the enterprise, or do we first need to learn how to manage them like part of the workforce?

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