Dave is the founder of AtScale and is the Chief Technology Officer. Prior to AtScale, he was VP of Engineering at Klout & at Yahoo! where he built the world’s largest multi-dimensional cube for BI on Hadoop. Mariani is a Big Data visionary & serial entrepreneur.
March 16, 2026
Using AI Agents for Data Analysis: How Autonomous Agents Are Changing AnalyticsFor a long time, enterprise analytics centered around building dashboards, running scheduled reports, and relying on the right person to ask the right question at the right time. That model is changing. Autonomous AI agents can now look through data…
March 17, 2026
Why Moving Data for BI and AI Creates Architecture ProblemsIn modern data architectures, analytics tools often replicate data from the warehouse into secondary systems to improve performance. While this can speed up dashboards, it introduces new problems: duplicated datasets, inconsistent metrics, fragmented governance, and rising cloud costs. Modern analytics…
March 12, 2026
Hits and Misses from Gartner Data & Analytics Summit 2026Gartner opened the Data & Analytics Summit 2026 with a memorable metaphor. The keynote framed the current moment as a raft ride through a roaring, treacherous river. The river represented AI. Fast-moving. Powerful. Difficult to control. The message was clear.…
March 11, 2026
AI Can’t Run on Untrusted Data: Why Agentic Analytics Requires Live Semantic ConnectivityA logistics company deploys an AI agent to monitor inventory and automatically trigger reorders. The model is solid. The prompts are well-engineered. The agent connects to their analytics environment and starts running. Three weeks in, it fires a reorder for…
March 5, 2026
Autonomous AI Without a Semantic Layer Is Just Expensive GuessingI've been in the BI and data space long enough to recognize when something fundamental shifts. Denny Lee and I first worked together when he was at Microsoft on SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), and I was a customer building…
February 25, 2026
Headless AI Agents Are Already Here and They’re Where the ROI IsMost enterprise AI conversations still center on prompts, whether through chat interfaces, copilots, or question-answer workflows. But the highest-value AI agents don’t wait for someone to ask a question. They monitor signals, detect thresholds, and trigger actions. These are headless…
February 20, 2026
Why Agentic AI Fails Without a Semantic LayerMany teams assume they’re doing agentic analytics because they support text-to-SQL or chat-based BI. And while conversational BI does change how questions are asked, it doesn’t go so far as to change how decisions are made. It’s like transitioning from…
February 17, 2026
The Hidden Costs of Letting People “Talk to Data” with AIConversational BI pilots succeed because they operate in constrained environments. A dozen users, curated datasets, predictable query patterns. When AI agents enter the picture, everything breaks. Gartner forecasts that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be abandoned by…
February 10, 2026
AI Governance Isn’t Theoretical Anymore: What Enterprise Leaders Are Actually AskingAI governance discussions used to center on frameworks and theoretical risk scenarios. This month’s TDWI webinar with Cal Al-Dhubaib, head of AI and data science at Further, revealed the many ways in which theory has moved to the practical. As…
February 3, 2026
Why Most Enterprise AI Projects Fail (and How to Make Them Work at Scale)Most enterprise AI projects follow a familiar pattern. Successful demos lead to promising pilots. Executives commit budgets to scale the initiative across departments. Then the wheels come off. Despite $30-40B in enterprise investment in GenAI, MIT’s Project NANDA found roughly…
January 29, 2026
Why Context Became the Most Critical Layer in Enterprise AII recently sat down with Juan Sequeda, Principal Researcher at ServiceNow and co-author of Designing and Building Enterprise Knowledge Graphs, to discuss what's happening in enterprise data and AI. Listen to the full podcast episode here. Juan brings a unique…
January 27, 2026
Why AtScale Is Helping Shape the Open Semantic Interchange (OSI) Initiative2026 is shaping up to be the year enterprises finally accept that semantic layers are no longer optional. As organizations scale AI initiatives and rationalize their analytics stacks, a familiar problem keeps resurfacing. The same business question produces different answers…
January 21, 2026
The Hidden Cost of Semantic Drift in Enterprise AIThree teams ask the same question: "What was our gross margin last quarter?" Finance's dashboard shows it’s 30%. Sales’ margin reports show 32%. The AI copilot reports 31%. Which one's correct? Technically, all of them. Each system defines "gross margin"…