Updated May 4, 2026
Microsoft Held Databricks Customers Hostage. Customers Paid the Ransom. Freedom Ends It.Microsoft made a small, deliberate change to the Power BI connector for Azure Databricks (release notes). The change looks technical, but it's really a move to seize control of the semantic layer, where your company defines what revenue, customer, and…
Updated May 4, 2026
Google Just Made Iceberg the Format Foundation of Compute. Make Sure Your Semantics Are Ready to Travel.What Google announced at Cloud Next wasn't an upgrade. It was a starting gun. Google announced a cross-cloud lakehouse standardized on Apache Iceberg. Not BigQuery's tables. Not a Google format. Iceberg. Open. Sitting in object storage you own. Readable by…
Updated April 30, 2026
BI Tools Keep Trying to Own Your Semantic LayerEvery decade, someone reinvents the BI-embedded model. Every decade, customers end up migrating off it. The semantic layer is the context layer for AI, and putting it inside one BI tool was the original sin. Last week, Omni raised a…
Updated April 29, 2026
The Math Behind the AnswerI'm hosting a session on May 20. Here's what we'll dig into. Agentic AI looks impressive in a demo, until you ask it a question your CFO actually cares about. If an AI agent can't reliably answer “What was net…
Updated April 28, 2026
Why I Stepped Off the Board and Joined AtScale as CMSOWhat I saw from the board, and why it matters if you’re betting your career on AI. When I joined AtScale’s board, I saw what looked like a best-in-class semantic layer: a way to make analytics faster, more consistent, and…
Updated April 27, 2026
3 Takeaways from Google Cloud Next 2026Google Cloud Next 2026 wrapped up this week at Mandalay Bay, and I’ve got thoughts. Some of them are even about the announcements. But let’s start with the elephant, or rather, the 40,000 people crammed into a venue built for…
Updated April 24, 2026
The Sensing Factory Needs Context: Why Semantic Infrastructure Is Critical for Agentic AI in ManufacturingExecutive Summary (The TL;DR) The Bottom Line: Agentic AI in manufacturing promises autonomous optimization, but without a Semantic Layer, it functions as a "high-speed hallucination engine." For a Tier 1 manufacturer, the lack of governed context results in an average…
Updated April 23, 2026
5 Reasons Enterprise AI Leaders Should Attend Semantic Layer Summit 2026If your organization has invested in AI and isn’t seeing returns, the problem probably isn’t the LLM. It’s the foundation underneath it. The enterprises getting AI into production built semantic infrastructure first: consistent business definitions, governed metrics, and shared context…
Updated 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…
Updated 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…
