Kiki Carter, Senior Manager, AI & Platform Engineering for Cockroach Labs, shares insights from her experience in developing agentic applications using AI agents and data layers. She highlights the importance of having a robust data foundation when integrating non-deterministic AI agents into a system, emphasizing the need for strong data consistency and resilience. Carter's journey began with simple AI applications that evolved to require persistent data, leading her to tackle the dual-write problem by initially using both CockroachDB and Pinecone. However, she eventually simplified her architecture by leveraging CockroachDB's support for vector embeddings, allowing her to co-locate relational and vector data, thereby avoiding dual-writes and enhancing performance. She stresses the significance of using CockroachDB for its consistent data principles, particularly its serializable isolation that prevents race conditions and corrupted states, which is crucial in maintaining user trust when deploying AI-enhanced applications.