December 19th, 2025 : In the December edition of the Tech Forward series, jointly organised by HYSEA and IIIT Hyderabad Research Outreach, and graciously hosted at OpenText Hyderabad, senior data engineering and AI leaders came together to deliberate on one of the most defining themes of our time, Data Engineering in the emerging realm of AI. 
 
The session, chaired by Sangeetha Yanamandra, featured deep dive presentations by Maunendra Desarkar, Professor at IIT Hyderabad, and industry leader Sathrukkan Kandaswamy. Addressing a packed room of 100 plus technology leaders, researchers, and academicians, the discussions surfaced powerful insights on how data foundations must evolve to support trustworthy and scalable AI systems. 
 
Key Takeaways | Tech Forward December: Data Engineering in the emerging realm of AI 
 
* Data engineering has moved beyond traditional ETL and is now a core enabler of AI first systems, not just a function for moving data into warehouses. 
 
* The emergence of the “Data Wall”, driven by the scarcity of high quality human generated data, is accelerating the use of synthetic data and strategic data mixing to sustain AI growth. 
 
* Over reliance on social media data improves conversational fluency but introduces risks of low factual accuracy, bias, toxicity, and echo chamber effects without a balanced data strategy. 
 
* Retrieval Augmented Generation, or RAG, is becoming critical to ground AI outputs using private, trusted, and up to date enterprise data. 
 
* Automated pipelines for deduplication and PII removal are essential to ensure data quality, privacy, and compliance at scale. 
 
* Data quality is no longer a one time activity but a continuous operational discipline that underpins reliable, knowledge driven AI systems. 
 
Grateful to the speakers, partners, and the engaged audience for making this an insightful and forward looking session.