Autonomous agents promise substantial gains in speed, scale, and labor efficiency, but their failures can impose abrupt and often irreversible costs. The central challenge for agentic automation is therefore to increase the benefits of automation while bounding the consequences of failure. While databases remain central to modern computing, agents operate over a broader data environment spanning files, APIs, applications, and system state. In this talk, I will outline early work on Agentic Data Environments -- the execution substrate in which agents operate -- that both amplify agent capabilities and enforce safety guarantees. This perspective reframes data systems from passive stores of state into active substrates for safe, reliable execution.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate queries, invoke tools, and construct analytical workflows. Although recent advances have substantially improved workflow generation and execution, the semantic information required to operationalize analytical concepts often lies beyond what is explicitly represented in database schemas and data values. We present a cross-domain formative study of operationalization failures in agent-generated analytical workflows. Across 236 analytical intents spanning finance, human resources, and public safety domains, we identify 153 recurring failures despite successful workflow generation and execution. Our analysis reveals five recurring classes of failures: comparative grounding, process reasoning, quantitative reasoning, role confusion, and policy grounding. These findings suggest a semantic gap between user-level analytical concepts and the information available to workflow-generation systems. More broadly, they raise questions about the admissibility of analytical operations and suggest that future agentic data systems may require richer semantic representations to bridge the gap between analytical intent and executable computation.
Agentic discovery has shown that LLM-driven search can find novel algorithms, designs, and code under benchmark conditions. Translating the paradigm to multi-system data backends surfaces a harder problem: the search space is heterogeneous, the verifier is whether a deployed stack actually runs, and composition knowledge is unevenly captured in pretraining. Unbounded agentic discovery, a coding agent iterating on failure-log feedback, fails to converge consistently on a working stack even when iteration and explicit composition knowledge are added. We propose Declarative Data Services (DDS), an architecture for structured agentic discovery of data-system compositions from declarative user intent. The framework owns four typed contracts at successive layers (intent, operator DAG, per-system skills, runtime attribution) that decompose the global search into bounded sub-searches; sub-agents search each typed space, while the framework provides the channels by which knowledge flows forward as inline skill citations and errors route backward as typed signals. As a proof of life on a trading-backend workload, DDS converges where unbounded discovery does not; runtime failures become skill patches that the next deployment cites inline. We position this as an early prototype reporting lessons from real-world data-system composition.