Artificial Intelligence in Data-Driven Environments by Steve Millan

Data platforms were built to store and analyze information. Now they must do something far more ambitious: think.

Artificial Intelligence in Data-Driven Environments is the definitive practitioner's guide to designing, building, and operating the modern data platform infrastructure that makes enterprise AI not just possible, but production-ready, scalable, and trustworthy. Written by data architect and AI engineer Steve Millan, this book bridges the critical gap between data engineering and machine learning — the gap where most enterprise AI initiatives quietly fail.

From Lakehouse architecture and real-time streaming pipelines to vector databases and foundation model deployment, from MLOps discipline and drift monitoring to AI governance and regulatory compliance — this book covers the complete engineering stack required to turn raw data into reliable intelligence at scale.

You will learn how to architect AI-native data platforms that serve both analytics and ML workloads from a unified infrastructure. How to design feature stores that eliminate the training-serving skew that silently kills production models. How to build automated retraining pipelines that keep models aligned with a changing world. How to integrate large language models and RAG systems into enterprise data environments without hallucination, runaway costs, or governance failures. And how to build the organizational structures, data cultures, and risk management frameworks that determine whether your AI investments compound into lasting competitive advantage — or evaporate into impressive demos that never reach production.

The algorithms are available to everyone. The cloud platforms are available to everyone. The foundation models are available to everyone. What separates AI leaders from AI laggards is the data platform — the infrastructure, discipline, and governance that makes AI work in the real world, day after day, at scale.

Whether you are a data engineer ready to evolve into AI infrastructure, a machine learning engineer who needs to understand the platform beneath your models, a data architect designing the next generation of your organization's data systems, or a technical leader building an enterprise AI capability — this book gives you the blueprint.

Build the platform. Earn the intelligence.