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.
April 16, 2026
Why Retail AI Agents Need Business Context for Autonomous CommerceRetailers that deploy autonomous AI without governed business context will not discover the problem in a report. They will discover it in a fulfillment failure, a margin error, or a pricing decision that made sense to the agent but not…
April 9, 2026
From Data Gravity to Context Gravity: Why AI Is Reshaping Data ArchitectureAI is shifting the center of gravity in data architecture from raw data to a governed business context. The last decade of data architecture was shaped by data gravity. The next decade will be shaped by context gravity. The cloud…
April 1, 2026
Not All Semantic Layers Are Built for AIThe semantic layer has moved from niche infrastructure to a boardroom priority. Snowflake announced one. Databricks announced one. Google repositioned Looker as one. Microsoft repositioned Power BI as one. This is genuinely good news. As ISG analyst Matt Aslett observed…
March 26, 2026
Power BI & Excel on Snowflake Without Data Movement | Semantic Layer for AIMost enterprises have already standardized where their data lives. What they haven’t standardized is how that data is interpreted. Power BI and Excel users still rely on a workaround: moving data out of Snowflake into extracts, cubes, or Microsoft Fabric…
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…