The explosion of data and the rise of AI agents have brought cloud-native systems to a critical tipping point. While the CNCF has driven significant advancements, the challenges of fault tolerance and state management in the age of AI remain unresolved both at the core and the edge.

This keynote examines how data gravity, distributed environments, and the complexity of AI workloads demand a fundamental shift from stateless architectures to intelligent, state-aware platforms. This provides a unique opportunity for the CNCF and its ecosystem to pave the way for a new generation of cloud-native, resilient, cost efficient, scalable, and AI-ready systems, while tackling the pressing challenges that lie ahead.