BOSTON – At its annual AI & Datanova event, Starburst today announced the Starburst Enterprise Intelligence Platform, enabling enterprises to run AI directly on governed data across distributed environments.
At the center of the platform is AIDA, now generally available, which brings AI-powered intelligence directly into the workflows, applications, and agents where business users work. Starburst also introduced new AI-Ready Data Products that provide consistent business context for queries, models, and AI agents, along with additional capabilities including Icehouse Ingest and Icehouse LakeOps for Apache Iceberg operations, and Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) deployments for customer-managed infrastructure.
According to Mavvrik’s 2025 research, 84% of companies report AI costs are reducing gross margins by more than 6% — not because AI doesn’t work, but because the data beneath it doesn’t. Data remains fragmented across clouds, lakes, SaaS apps, and operational systems, forcing expensive data movement, creating governance blind spots, and eroding confidence in AI outputs. The result is slower, lower-confidence decisions, higher costs, and AI initiatives that stall before they scale.
Starburst’s answer is to bring AI to the data, not the other way around. The Starburst Enterprise Intelligence Platform gives enterprises a single platform to run AI directly on distributed data, in place, without moving or replatforming, while providing consistent business context to queries, models, and agents regardless of where data is stored or processed — across clouds, catalogs, and enterprise systems.
Intelligence Where Work Happens: AIDA
AIDA helps users move from question to action by generating visualizations, triggering workflows, opening tickets, updating records, and initiating processes across connected systems — without leaving the applications they use. Through support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), AIDA can also connect to external tools, unstructured content, and third-party systems to provide richer context across enterprise workflows.
“AI has outpaced data architecture,” said Justin Borgman, co-founder and CEO of Starburst. “Most enterprises are trying to layer AI on top of fragmented, ungoverned data, and it’s not working. At AI+Datanova, we’re showing a different path. With the Enterprise Intelligence Platform and AIDA, organizations can finally operationalize AI – in weeks, not months – on top of the data they already have, without moving it or rebuilding their stack.”
Building the Foundation for Trusted Enterprise AI
AI systems produce unreliable answers when they query data without understanding what it means. Starburst addresses this through AI-Ready Data Products, which combine governed data, metadata, and business definitions into reusable, trusted assets for analytics and AI, regardless of where data resides.
Rather than requiring organizations to rebuild semantic definitions from scratch, Starburst previewed its new query-in-place approach to business context that already exists across catalogs, BI tools, and data pipelines. New AI-Ready Data Products capabilities include Data Products as Code, now in public preview, and Automatic Metadata Enrichment, now generally available.
Performance & Resilience Built for AI-Scale Analytics
Powered by an engine that delivers up to 2x the performance of open source Trino, Starburst gives enterprises the speed they need to run AI and analytics workloads at scale. New resilience capabilities in the Starburst Enterprise Platform (SEP) ensure mission-critical AI and agentic systems continue operating without disruption during infrastructure failures.
Starburst is also introducing Managed Icehouse, a new capability built on the open architecture of Apache Iceberg and Trino — already used by Netflix, Apple, Shopify, and Stripe — that automates the full lifecycle of Apache Iceberg tables across two core capabilities:
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Icehouse Ingest for streaming and batch ingestion of files
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Icehouse LakeOps for intelligent table optimization, query tuning and comprehensive table health observability
Managed Icehouse gives enterprises a fully managed way to operate open lakehouse infrastructure across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
