
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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