Andrew Madson

Head of Developer Relations | Author
Fivetran
USA

About

Andrew helps data and Al startups build developer communities that drive adoption and revenue.Currently Founding Head of Developer Relations at Fivetran.Before DevRel, Andrew spent a decade leading analytics and ML teams at J.P. Morgan Chase, MassMutual, LPL Financial, and Arizona State University – shipping models, building data platforms, and managing cross-functional teams at scale
Talk

Andrew Madson | Iceberg for Agents – Elevate Data Lakehouse Content Into Al- Ready Context

Apache Iceberg, Data Lakehouse, AI, Agent
Al agents fail in production because they’re overwhelmed with data but starved for context. LLM models aren’t the problem. The bottleneck is the data stack: fragmented silos, inconsistent definitions, and logic hidden in tribal knowledge. Agents need structured, reliable, and interpretable context-not just data access.In this session, we’ll show how Apache Iceberg becomes the backbone of Al-ready pipelines. You’ll learn how to elevate your Iceberg implementation from a storage format to a live context layer that powers structured retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), schema-aware agents, and autonomous reasoning grounded in truth.What we’ll cover:1. Iceberg Foundations for Al – from ACID to TimeTravel2. From Rows to Relationships – The role of the semantic layer3. Structured RAG in Practice – Fully open sourceThe session includes a live demo of a fully open- source Structured RAG stack built on Apache Iceberg, featuring semantic query translation, hybrid retrieval, and governed agent reasoning. Expect architecture diagrams, real code, and practical guidance.