Building a multimodal lakehouse for AI (w/ Chang She)

Building a multimodal lakehouse for AI (w/ Chang She)

From The Analytics Engineering Podcast by dbt Labs, Inc.

November 23, 2025 · 57 min

About this episode

Tristan Handy interviews Chang She about the intersection of analytics and AI engineering, focusing on LanceDB's innovative approach to building an AI-native lakehouse.

In this episode, Tristan Handy sits down with Chang She — a co-creator of Pandas and now CEO of LanceDB — to explore the convergence of analytics and AI engineering. The team at LanceDB is rebuilding the data lake from the ground up with AI as a first principle, starting with a new AI-native file format called Lance. Tristan traces Chang's journey as one of the original contributors to the pandas library to building a new infrastructure layer for AI-native data. Learn why vector databases alone aren't enough, why agents require new architecture, and how LanceDB is building a AI lakehouse for the future. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com . The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

People in this episode

Host: Tristan Handy

Guest: Chang She

Topics covered

  • AI engineering
  • data lake
  • analytics
  • vector databases
  • infrastructure
  • LanceDB
  • Pandas

Keywords

  • AI lakehouse
  • LanceDB
  • Pandas
  • data engineering
  • vector databases
  • analytics

Sponsors

dbt Labs

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: LanceDB, pandas

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