PhoenixAI announces NEXT QUERY 2026 summit for AI data infrastructure

Preparing for agentic AI

PhoenixAI recently announced the program for its NEXT QUERY 2026 summit, a virtual event dedicated to data and AI infrastructure. The summit is scheduled for Wednesday, November 4, and is free for the public to attend. It aims to bring together technical leaders to discuss how to build analytics systems that function today while preparing for a future dominated by AI agents.

The event is organized by the company behind StarRocks, an open-source project that is now part of the Linux Foundation. PhoenixAI describes itself as an agentic AI database company, which means it builds tools specifically designed to give autonomous AI agents fast access to enterprise data. The summit will explore how these systems can unify real-time and at-rest data in a single engine.

James Li, the co-founder and CEO of PhoenixAI, noted that the next query might come from a person, an application, or an agent. He stated that the teams participating in the program are already building for all three types of users. The goal is to ensure that the infrastructure can handle the specific speed and concurrency demands that agentic workloads require.

Real-world production cases

A major focus of the summit is sharing practical experience from companies currently running these systems in production. Rather than theoretical discussions, the sessions will feature speakers from major firms like Apple, AWS, Cisco, and Coinbase. These engineers will describe the specific systems they have built and the technical challenges they faced during deployment.

For example, Intuit Mailchimp will present a session on how they rebuilt their real-time customer data platform. Other companies like Toss will discuss the specific difficulties of managing workloads and permissions when AI agents are allowed to query the StarRocks database directly. These case studies are intended to show what worked, what failed, and what the teams would do differently if they started over.

The program is divided into two distinct tracks to help attendees navigate different technical needs. The first track, Context & Intelligence, focuses on where an agent's context should live. The second track, Systems & Scale, addresses the underlying infrastructure required to support massive data volumes. This structure allows engineers to choose between high-level architectural strategy and deep-dive technical implementation.

Hardware and scale

The summit will also address the physical and computational requirements of modern AI data infrastructure. NVIDIA and PhoenixAI are scheduled to walk through the GPU acceleration work currently being developed within StarRocks. This is significant because GPU acceleration is often necessary to maintain the sub-second speeds required for live enterprise data access.

Carbon Arc is also set to present a session on how they serve a petabyte of live data while simultaneously reducing their query costs. Managing such massive amounts of information requires a balance between performance and the financial cost of running the queries. These sessions provide a look at how large-scale enterprises are trying to make AI-native engines economically viable.

The event also features a conversation between PhoenixAI and Moonshot AI, the company behind Kimi. They will discuss the specific requirements for giving agents live, queryable state, history, and structure. Other participants, including StreamNative, Fresha, and PuppyGraph, will also demonstrate how they provide these capabilities to their own users and applications.

The future of data access

PhoenixAI's platform is designed to be flexible, running either as a fully managed service in a customer's cloud or as a self-managed system on private hardware. This flexibility is crucial for enterprises that have strict governance requirements or need to keep their data on-premises. The company, which was formerly known as CelerData, aims to provide a unified engine for these diverse environments.

By focusing on the infrastructure layer, PhoenixAI is positioning itself as a foundational piece of the AI stack. The summit serves as a platform to show how the StarRocks project has evolved since its creation in 2020. It highlights the transition from traditional database management to a model where the database must be

Summit logistics

The virtual event will run for seven hours, with each session lasting 30 minutes to ensure a high volume of information is covered. All sessions will be recorded for those who register in advance, making the content accessible to those who cannot attend the live broadcast on November 4. The summit will conclude with a social lounge and an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session regarding StarRocks.

Registration for the event is currently open through the official PhoenixAI website. The summit is designed for a wide range of technical roles, including data engineers, architects, and technical leaders. It provides a space for these professionals to see how their peers are solving the same problems of scale, cost, and agentic integration.

By bringing together speakers from Microsoft AI and other tech giants, PhoenixAI is creating a collaborative environment for infrastructure standards. The event underscores the shift toward