AI Is Changing The Way We Think About Databases
Infoworld, Monday, January 26th, 2026
The database is no longer just where data lives, but where context gets assembled. And in AI, context is everything.
Developers have spent the past decade trying to forget databases exist. Not literally, of course. We still store petabytes. But for the average developer, the database became an implementation detail; an essential but staid utility layer we worked hard not to think about.
We abstracted it behind object-relational mappers (ORM). We wrapped it in APIs. We stuffed semi-structured objects into columns and told ourselves it was flexible. We told ourselves that persistence was a solved problem and began to decouple everything.