Somewhere right now, a support chatbot is confidently telling a customer about a product that was discontinued six months ago. The model is fine. The vector database is fine. The batch job that feeds it just hasn’t run yet. After spending over a decade building high-throughput Kafka and Debezium pipelines for production environments, watching teams bolt state-of-the-art LLMs onto fragile, legacy batch infrastructure is becoming a recognizable and entirely avoidable anti-pattern. This talk explores Change Data Capture (CDC) as the missing data layer for RAG applications. We will look beyond the whiteboard to see what a real Debezium-to-Kafka-to-LLM pipeline actually looks like, how to handle embeddings in flight, and what breaks in production. The data streaming world solved the stale data problem years ago; it is time we bring those mature, event-driven patterns into the modern AI stack.
Serhat Kayikci is a software architect and Senior Consultant at iC Consult in Hamburg, specializing in event-driven architecture, Kafka, and CDC pipelines. With over 15 years of backend engineering experience across enterprise and automotive sectors in Germany, he also operates as an independent infrastructure consultant. Currently bridging the gap between robust backend systems and MLOps, Serhat focuses on the intersection of real-time streaming data and production-ready AI.
