As teams build AI agents, many discover a surprising requirement along the way: Yes—your agent still needs a database.

In this episode of The Shift Podcast: Agentic Edition, members of the Microsoft Azure Database team discuss why databases remain a core part of agentic application architectures. The conversation explores how AI apps and agents place different demands on databases compared to traditional applications.

The discussion covers:

· Why agents often rely on existing enterprise databases.

· How relational and open‑source databases fit into AI workflows.

· What changes when databases support search, context, and retrieval.

· How Azure databases are evolving to support AI‑driven applications.

Rather than po ...