The Founder of Arcitecta Talks Metadata in the Age of AI

In a world racing toward AI-driven automation and hyper-personalized content, Arcitecta's CEO and CTO, Jason Lohrey, emphasizes that metadata, context, and human intent matter more than ever. Known for his decades-long vision and understated influence in data management, Jason shares insights on real-time systems, AI-native workflows, the fragility of creative agency, and why randomness might be the last frontier of innovation.

From film to infrastructure: a creative technologist's arc

Jason began his career in film technology, working with Kodak and Discreet Logic before founding Arcitecta in the late '90s with a vision to create software from first principles. "I wanted to run a company that does things with data," Jason enthuses. "Data at scale." That vision has proven prescient, as today's enterprises struggle not just with storing data but understanding, enriching, and using it across distributed ecosystems.

What we get wrong about asset management

"What does 'asset management' trigger in your mind?" Jason asks. "For most people, it means brand asset management. But very few organizations actually treat their data as a capital asset." He challenges enterprises to catalogue, value, and track their data like they would physical or financial assets. "Where did my data come from? Where is it going? What value is it providing to my organization? We just need to think bigger."

[Link]Jason operating a Cineon System, one of the first computer-based digital film systems, created by Kodak.

Metadata as the forensic fingerprint of a system

Jason defines metadata as simply: "The ability to answer questions." He adds, "It's the fingerprint of what's going on. It lets you forensically reconstruct what happened, where things came from, and who did what." With the rise of vector databases and AI, Jason sees metadata taking on new forms but insists that context is still everything. "The vector has no meaning without the context in which it was created."

"You'll never hear someone complain about having too much metadata," he says, "only about not knowing what they have."

[Link]Brody, Jane, and Karrie looking at some samples under the microscope at the Taronga Zoo. They've been using Mediaflux since 2010 for all their wildlife research.

From management to fluency: unlocking the true value of data

When asked whether 'data management' is too narrow a goal, Jason argues for a more holistic view. "We need to stop thinking of this as just 'data management.' It's not about the bits, it's about what you want to do with the data. It's about enabling discovery, transformation, and dissemination across people, places, and machines." He calls for data systems that function like systems of systems, able to operate across structure and intent together to unlock value across an organization.

[Link]Emily King, program manager at Arcitecta, second from bottom left. Arcitecta is a sponsor of Women at Pause Fest, an innovation festival for Australian Tech.

Real-Time: a platform for the distributed world

In a world where compute and talent are increasingly dispersed globally, enabling seamless, low-latency data access becomes mission-critical. Arcitecta's bold and elegant answer to this challenge is, Mediaflux Real-Time®. "It's a real-time replicating file system," Jason explains. "You write at Site A, and it shows up at Site B within the latency of the network. What you write in one location arrives in another in real time."

Prompted by a Dell customer request to solve the growing file problem, Real-Time quickly became more than a feature, it became foundational. "One broadcaster told me, 'This is a game changer,'" Jason says. And while its media applications are clear, Jason sees it being just as useful in stock trading, medical research, and distributed compute. "Sometimes you can't move the people to where the compute is, so you have to move the data to the people."

Arcitecta's Mediaflux Real-Time® architecture.

AI Is data, and data needs a frame

Arcitecta is intentionally cautious approaching AI, considering decades of hype cycles. But Jason sees AI-generated outputs as just more data that must coexist with structured and unstructured sources. "[AI] needs data to train, and it generates data as output. That output still needs to live alongside your structured and unstructured sources." Arcitecta has developed its own vector database integrated with object, time-series, and geospatial capabilities.

"You want to say, 'show me all the photos taken in Queensland in the last week that contain cats.' That's a mix of structured and semantic queries. The real value is in an integrated whole."

Jason is skeptical about concerns AI might make metadata obsolete. "Until we get one grand unified model that understands everything in every context, and we won't, we'll always need metadata. You still need to know which model you used, what version, and what it means."

Collaboration reinvented

While most collaboration tools have evolved incrementally, Jason believes it's time for a rethink. For him, the future of teamwork lies not in more apps, but in unified, intelligent systems treating communication as data to be analyzed and optimized. "Email? It's inherently insecure," Jason notes. "And it's just one of 20 different communication vectors we all deal with." He believes the way we collaborate needs to be reimagined as a data problem, not just a UX problem. "We need to integrate communication and prioritize across channels. We need auditability, intelligence, and better fraud detection." He went on to hint that Arcitecta may have something exciting to say on this front soon.

Agentic workloads & the return of the director

As businesses embrace agentic AI to automate the mundane and add intelligence to their workflows, a new creative role emerges for humans. Jason envisions a shift from execution to orchestration, a future where people become strategic directors empowered by intelligent systems. "The goal," he says, "is for humans to work on the business, not in it." With agentic AI workloads, people can move upstream, focusing on higher-level insights. "But not everyone will get the same value out of these tools; some people will pull out amazing patterns, others won't find much at all."

On personalization and creative freedom

As AI-driven personalization reshapes media and content, Jason raises a cautionary flag: convenience shouldn't come at the cost of curiosity. In an age of curated experiences, he champions randomness as a path to creative discovery. Jason is wary of over-personalization. "It narrows our experience. We stop exploring," he warns. "Someone said they weaned themselves off curated playlists and discovered music they never would've heard otherwise. That's the risk right there."

A self-described steampunk enthusiast, Jason values analog, randomness, and first-person experience. "You still need to use a pencil. You need randomness. You need to make."

Why Dell

Behind every great software company is a reliable infrastructure partner. For Arcitecta, that partner is Dell. Their long-standing collaboration reflects a shared belief in performance, scale, and trust. "We're a software company. We need great hardware," Jason emphasizes. "Most of our customers use Dell. They trust it. And so do we." He praises Dell's global reach and reliability, especially with PowerScale and initiatives like Project Lightning, an ultra-fast caching tier that enables extreme performance and scalability. "That's a quantum change in scratch storage," he notes. "We've hopped on the right horse."

The road ahead

Jason remains both pragmatic and curious about what comes next. Whether it's AI, quantum computing, or something yet to emerge, regardless of what the next computing revolution looks like, Jason's ethos remains unchanged: build things that matter, with craftsmanship, innovation, and intent. Quantum computing is on his radar. "I've got a quantum physics background," he says, "so I watch this closely. We'll have a role to play, but it's not clear what that is yet."

Arcitecta continues to shape the means to make sense of tomorrow's data by developing tools to integrate, contextualize, and make data usable for humans, not just machines. "Don't be passive," is Jason's appeal. "Even in a digital world, you've got to be active. Don't let curated experiences and recommendation engines narrow your world. You have to resist the urge to outsource your creativity to algorithms. Innovation still comes from stepping outside the stream and exploring what isn't already being served to you."

[Link]Jason and team at supercomputing conference.

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Check out Inside the Real-Time File Revolution: A Conversation with Arcitecta's Jason Lohrey and Dell's Alex Timbs to learn more about how Dell and Arcitecta are helping M&E customers capture and share content on the fly across incredible distances.