Real-time features, AI search, Agentic similarities

Varant Zanoyan and Nikhil Simha Raprolu of Zipline AI explain why traditional feature stores are the wrong abstraction. They detail the journey of Chronon, the open-source engine born at Airbnb and battle-tested at Stripe, which focuses on compute, orchestration, and real-time correctness to solve the hardest data engineering challenges in ML, from fraud detection to powering modern AI agents with features and embeddings.