What Happens When Billions of AI Agents Hit Your Database? (Andy Pavlo)

The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck · Oct 8, 2026 · 1h 16m

AI agents are becoming the biggest users of databases: creating them, querying them, and sometimes deleting them. Andy Pavlo, Carnegie Mellon's database professor and now VP of Database Research at ClickHouse, explains what changes when billions of agents hit the data layer, and why most of the AI world's mental model of databases stopped at vector databases and RAG.

Andy's CMU courses taught a generation of engineers (and, it turns out, the AI models); he writes the year-in-review on databases the whole industry reads; and this summer he joined ClickHouse to found ClickHouse Labs. We cover…