Think your expensive GPUs are the biggest factor in AI performance? Think again. Without a high-performance data storage strategy to keep them supplied with data, your AI infrastructure can become an expensive machine sitting idle. In this episode of the Tech Field Day Podcast, host Alastair Cooke is joined by industry experts Barton George and Ron Pagani Jr. to discuss the industry’s shift from data-intensive AI training to fast, transaction-heavy inference workloads and how data gravity is forcing organizations to rethink where they place data, caches, and compute resources. They also examine rising DRAM and SSD costs, the challenges of deploying Small Language Models (SLMs) at the edge, and the growing need for security and governance as autonomous AI agents become more common in enterprise environments.