By Przemek Tomczak, Director of Industry, Partnerships & Alliances
After spending an inspiring week at DTW Ignite 2025 in Copenhagen, it’s clear that we’re standing on the brink of monumental change. With its theme, “Pathways to Growth: Real challenges, real solutions, real change,” the event brought together some of the brightest minds to discuss actionable strategies for accelerating innovation. From thought-provoking keynotes to dynamic panel discussions, there was a singular focus on how businesses can unlock new levels of efficiency, intelligence, and scalability in their data operations.
TL;DR — Why This Year’s DTW Mattered
- Agentic AI hit production. Carriers showcased live pilots in fraud detection, network healing, and customer care.
- Data platforms emerged as the bottleneck and the unlock. Sub-second analytics at petabyte scale is now expected.
- Governance became non-negotiable. CSPs pushed for end-to-end observability for all AI actions.
This year, one theme stole the spotlight: the rise of agentic AI and its implications for data platforms. According to Gartner research, agentic AI this will lead to a 30 percent reduction in operational costs. But how do you architect for a world where AI agents autonomously generate, query, and react to endless streams of data? At Ocient, we see a unique intersection of technology and strategy that enables organizations to adapt and thrive in this new landscape.
Here’s my reflection on the most impactful takeaways from this year’s DTW Ignite and actionable insights to help you prepare for what’s next.
The Era of AI Agents Is Here
DTW Ignite 2025 underscored the transformative potential of agentic AI. These adaptive, autonomous digital agents operate at massive scale, making complex decisions across systems — instantly and without human intervention. They’re not just “smart helpers.” They’re already adding value by detecting anomalies, automating networks, and enhancing customer experiences in real-time.
Imagine this: One agent flags a network anomaly in milliseconds. Another pulls historical logs. A third recommends a fix. Others execute actions autonomously — all powered by a data platform designed for speed, scale, and intelligence.
The Challenge for Data Platforms
AI agents rely on robust data infrastructure. To thrive, they require:
- Massive concurrency: Thousands of agent-initiated queries per second.
- Unified views: Seamless blending real-time and deep historical data.
- Speed at scale: Performance without compromise.
- Governance built-in: Full observability, lineage, and access control.
Failure to meet these criteria risks inaccurate, untrustworthy, or slow decision-making systems.
At Ocient, our clients join live CDR streams with trillion-record datasets and still achieve sub-second SLAs. Other industry leaders have showcased similar capabilities, reflecting a broader shift toward high-performance data platforms.
From Single Queries to Chains of Thought
A recurring theme at DTW was “chains of thought.” As Anthony Rodrigo of Axiata said, “We’ve built 10,000 APIs. Now AI shows us which Lego pieces to use.” That line captured a broader shift: innovation is no longer just about building new parts — it’s about orchestrating what you already have.
AI agents don’t just ask one question—they sequence logic, adapting based on each prior result. One query triggers the next, forming decision chains that drive automation, insight, and action.
For example, an agent might answer a customer’s initial question, then automatically launch a series of follow-up actions, culminating in a personalized experience.
Chains of thought are sequences where AI agents iteratively query data, adapting each step based on prior outputs, enabling more nuanced automation and decision-making.
Governed, high-quality data is essential: Without it, even the most capable AI agents can make incorrect decisions, putting accuracy, trust, and safety at risk.
Ocient’s Compute Adjacent Storage Architecture (CASA) co-locates compute and storage, minimizing latency and preserving data lineage. This enables agents to operate on petabyte-scale data, fast and reliably. Other vendors are also advancing architectures prioritizing low latency and robust lineage tracking.
Observability and Governance are Table Stakes
DTW panelists raised important questions about AI hallucinations, model drift, compliance, and risk. The consensus: AI agents must be auditable by design.
- Transparency and traceability: Every agent action must be logged and explainable.
- Compliance: Adherence to regulatory requirements is mandatory.
As Willie Stegmann of Vodafone put it, “We must move from promise to execution. AI is not a science project.” That sentiment echoed throughout the event — emphasizing that safe, scalable governance is the price of production AI.
At Ocient, we ingest and analyze high-resolution telemetry that was once infeasible, so organizations can track every agent action with precision. The industry as a whole is moving rapidly to embed observability and governance into AI operations.
Pathways to Growth
According to TM Forum, carriers that deployed agentic AI cut fraud losses and minimize other operational risks in 2024. To capture similar gains:
- Stress-test concurrency. Model 10× current query load, combined with real-time and historical joins.
- Evaluate analytics performance. Ensure your platform delivers low-latency, unified views across hot and cold data. Test for high-frequency, multi-query workloads, secondary indexing, and complex multi-source joins.
- Scale efficiently. Use compression, distributed indexing, and compute-storage adjacency to reduce storage footprint and cost per query by up to 60%.
- Embed observability. Capture data lineage, inputs, queries, and outputs to agents—not just system-level metrics.
DTW Ignite 2025 made it clear: despite ongoing challenges in AI and data infrastructure, the upside is massive. Data speed and governance have become the new competitive moat, and the winners will empower AI agents to operate at human-impossible scale with confidence.
While Ocient’s solutions address many of these challenges, the industry as a whole is innovating rapidly, with multiple vendors introducing solutions for high concurrency, observability, and governance.
Ready to explore how Ocient can accelerate your AI roadmap and data strategy? I’d love to connect.