AI Insights and Developments

AI Isn’t Replacing BI. It’s Finally Finishing the Job.

[AI Isn’t Replacing BI. It’s Finally Finishing the Job.](/content/blog/ai-isnt-replacing-bi/ "AI Isn’t Replacing BI. It’s Finally Finishing the Job."/index.html)
Will AI replace BI? Consider this: The cloud didn't kill the data warehouse. Self-service didn't kill the dashboard. Donald Farmer, who's watched decades of this cycle repeat, put it to me plainly on the Data-Driven podcast: every generation of data…

Five Questions Every CDO Should Ask About AI and Semantics

[Five Questions Every CDO Should Ask About AI and Semantics](/content/blog/cdo-questions-ai-semantics/ "Five Questions Every CDO Should Ask About AI and Semantics"/index.html)
The metrics powering your AI agents right now, like margin per square foot or total economic cost, probably don't belong to you. They belong to whichever platform computes them today. Snowflake, Databricks, the frontier LLM labs, Microsoft, Salesforce, Google, and…

My Case for the Semantic Layer, Made Live on Atlan’s Podcast

[My Case for the Semantic Layer, Made Live on Atlan’s Podcast](/content/blog/semantic-layer-vs-context-layer-deterministic-ai/ "My Case for the Semantic Layer, Made Live on Atlan’s Podcast"/index.html)
I recently joined Austin Kronz on Atlan's podcast, WTF is the Context Layer, to discuss one of the biggest sources of confusion in enterprise AI: the distinction between semantic layers, context layers, and ontologies. We covered a lot of ground,…

The Real AI Sovereignty Fight Is About Meaning

[The Real AI Sovereignty Fight Is About Meaning](/content/blog/ai-sovereignty-semantic-layer/ "The Real AI Sovereignty Fight Is About Meaning"/index.html)
In the last few weeks, the sovereignty conversation has moved from academic to urgent. Palantir's Alex Karp went on CNBC to explain the logic behind his company's partnership with NVIDIA and spent 20 minutes arguing that enterprises are handing frontier…

Three Companies Solved Their AI Problem Before AI Was the Problem

[Three Companies Solved Their AI Problem Before AI Was the Problem](/content/blog/ai-ready-data-before-agents/ "Three Companies Solved Their AI Problem Before AI Was the Problem"/index.html)
An agent is only as reliable as the definitions it's built on. And every company racing to deploy agentic AI right now is about to learn it the hard way. Here's what's actually happening at TELUS, Vodafone, and Slickdeals, three…

The Semantic Layer’s New Job

[The Semantic Layer’s New Job](/content/blog/semantic-layer-ai-infrastructure/ "The Semantic Layer’s New Job"/index.html)
Eighteen months ago, Blue Yonder’s analytics engineering team made a decision most data organizations haven’t made yet: they stopped being a BI team. They saw what was coming. AI agents don’t just need access to data. They need to understand…

Four AI Pillars and a Wide-Open Opportunity

[Four AI Pillars and a Wide-Open Opportunity](/content/blog/databricks-summit-2026-takeaways/ "Four AI Pillars and a Wide-Open Opportunity"/index.html)
I just got back from the Databricks Data & AI Summit, and I have a lot to unpack. This was the biggest DAIS yet, with 31,309 attendees, and the energy was unmistakable. More importantly, Databricks came in with a sharpened…

The Architecture Decision That Lets Carrefour’s Metrics Power Both Google Sheets and AI Agents

[The Architecture Decision That Lets Carrefour’s Metrics Power Both Google Sheets and AI Agents](/content/blog/carrefour-universal-semantic-layer/ "The Architecture Decision That Lets Carrefour’s Metrics Power Both Google Sheets and AI Agents"/index.html)
Imagine if every time you created a document in Microsoft Word you couldn’t read it anywhere else. Not as an email, PDF, or Google Doc. Any time you wanted to collaborate with a new team or adopt a new technology,…

Semantic Layer Summit Keynote: What It Takes to Make AI Work in the Enterprise

[Semantic Layer Summit Keynote: What It Takes to Make AI Work in the Enterprise](/content/blog/semantic-layer-requirements-enterprise-ai/ "Semantic Layer Summit Keynote: What It Takes to Make AI Work in the Enterprise"/index.html)
Every enterprise AI conversation eventually runs into the same wall. Someone pulls up the output from an agent or a natural language query, and someone else in the room says, “That number doesn't look right.” The AI project doesn't have…

How Anthropic’s AI Accuracy Went from 21% to 95%

[How Anthropic’s AI Accuracy Went from 21% to 95%](/content/blog/anthropic-ai-accuracy-semantic-layer/ "How Anthropic’s AI Accuracy Went from 21% to 95%"/index.html)
Anthropic's data science and engineering team runs its internal analytics on Claude, and this week, they published the accuracy figures. Without a semantic layer, the answers were right 21% of the time. With one, accuracy improved to 95%, and some…

Why Semantics, Not Metadata, Are the Key to Business Context for AI

[Why Semantics, Not Metadata, Are the Key to Business Context for AI](/content/blog/semantics-vs-metadata-business-context-ai/ "Why Semantics, Not Metadata, Are the Key to Business Context for AI"/index.html)
Five queries. $17.93 with an unguided LLM. Less than a tenth of a cent with a semantic layer. That 21,000x cost gap, measured by the commercial banking division of a Tier 1 multinational bank, is what happens when AI has…

Snowflake Summit 2026: Governed Semantic Views for CoCo, CoWork, Power BI, and Excel

[Snowflake Summit 2026: Governed Semantic Views for CoCo, CoWork, Power BI, and Excel](/content/blog/governed-semantic-views-coco-cowork-power-bi-excel/ "Snowflake Summit 2026: Governed Semantic Views for CoCo, CoWork, Power BI, and Excel"/index.html)
How Snowflake Semantic Views reach CoCo, CoWork, Power BI, and Excel without leaving the platform Executive Summary At Snowflake Summit 2026, Snowflake and AtScale introduced a new way to extend governed Snowflake Semantic Views to CoCo, CoWork, Power BI, and…