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.
August 21, 2026
The Missing Third Leg of Every Agentic AI StackEvery architecture diagram I see draws the same three boxes. Sometimes it's Model + RAG + MCP. Sometimes it's Model + MCP + Tools. The labels move around, but the shape never changes. The diagram describes how an agent reaches…
August 20, 2026
Inside a Real Benchmark: Measuring the Cost of AI on the WarehouseAny AI performance conversation runs the same three tracks: token costs, inference latency, and model accuracy, and all three numbers matter. But once an AI system reaches enterprise data, a fourth system starts determining both cost and performance: the data…
August 19, 2026
The Other Half of Intelligence EfficiencyAI usage isn't the same as AI value. That’s why Snowflake introduced “intelligence efficiency” this week. In a post on Snowflake's blog, CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy laid out how companies are pouring money into AI, and boards want proof it's translating…
"What was revenue in the Northeast region last quarter?" At first blush, the query looks simple enough. It reads like something you'd ask an analyst on your team and get an answer back in five minutes. But an LLM can't…
July 31, 2026
AI Isn’t Replacing BI. It’s Finally Finishing the Job.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…
July 28, 2026
Five Questions Every CDO Should Ask About AI and SemanticsThe 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…
July 22, 2026
My Case for the Semantic Layer, Made Live on Atlan’s PodcastI 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,…
July 13, 2026
The Real AI Sovereignty Fight Is About MeaningIn 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…
July 9, 2026
Three Companies Solved Their AI Problem Before AI Was the ProblemAn 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…
June 25, 2026
The Semantic Layer’s New JobEighteen 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…
June 23, 2026
Four AI Pillars and a Wide-Open OpportunityI 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…
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,…