The Modern Data Stack Lost the War: Stop Building more DataFrame APIs | OpenAI

[2026 - DAY 3 - LIGHTNING TALK] After more than a decade of limited innovation, the modern data stack is still slow, fragmented, and painfully repetitive. Every new dataframe library promises better ergonomics or performance, yet converges on the same API with the same limitations. The failure isn’t execution or scale, it is ignoring that appearance doesn't matter anymore: Agents and AI-first developers couldn't care less about how an API looks today. In this talk we’ll examine why the dataframe paradigm keeps reproducing itself, why it consistently underdelivers, and why the data stack’s biggest problems were never going to be solved at the API layer first. Princess Leia once put her trust into Obi-Wan Kenobi - what if we did the same with simple Python functions? Could we defeat the evil empire of DataFrame APIs? SPEAKER: Leonhard Spiegelberg - Member of Technical Staff, OpenAI 👉 Sign up for our "No BS" Newsletter to get the latest technical data & AI content: https://aicouncil.com/newsletter ABOUT AI COUNCIL: AI Council brings together the brightest minds in data to share industry knowledge, technical architectures and best practices in building cutting edge data & AI systems and tools. FIND US: Website: https://aicouncil.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aicouncilconf/ X: https://x.com/aicouncilconf