Chris Lynch has been saying the same thing for years. The market just caught up.
For years, I’ve been a board member of AtScale, and Chris Lynch said the same thing with each meeting: AI is changing everything for semantic layers. This year, it happened. AI has arrived and the cost and inaccuracy of raw data have become a CFO-and-CEO concern at every Fortune 500 company. Fast, confident, wrong AI answers are dangerous.
Semantic layers are now white hot, widely recognized as the infrastructure that determines whether enterprise AI returns answers you can actually trust.
That’s what Lynch has been building toward at AtScale. The Boston Globe’s 2026 Tech Power Players 50 recognition is the market catching up. I caught up, too: I left the board in May and joined Chris as CMAO to help the company navigate these gail-force tailwinds.
How agentic AI made governed semantics a hard requirement
For a long time, enterprises were focused on building data lakes and standing up dashboards. The semantic layer was a nice-to-have. Then AI agents changed everything.
You can’t build agentic workflows on top of definitions that vary by tool or team. When a finance system and a marketing platform use different logic to calculate revenue, a human analyst catches the discrepancy. An AI agent doesn’t. It returns a confidently wrong answer.
The industry started to echo that sentiment. Gartner identified missing semantics as a root cause of inaccurate AI agents and wasted enterprise spending. GigaOm named AtScale a Leader and Fast Mover in its 2025 Semantic Layer Radar. Dresner Advisory tracked semantic layer adoption at an all-time high. As the buzz around the semantic layer became more urgent, AtScale had a year to match it.
“Governed semantics are no longer optional. They’re the foundation for reliable analytics and AI you can trust.”
— Chris Lynch, CEO & Executive Chairman, AtScale
AtScale’s big year: how a white-hot market validated what they’d been building all along.
Over the past 12 months, the market has moved in the same direction, most notably when Snowflake Ventures led AtScale’s largest equity financing to date. Snowflake put money behind the thesis that governed semantics are foundational to AI that works.
Then AtScale launched AtScale for Snowflake Semantic Views, letting enterprises extend governed metrics directly to Power BI and Excel without moving data, duplicating storage, or rebuilding definitions in a separate tool. No extra tools or data movement required.
At the same time, the executive team got stronger:
- Jay Schuren joined as President
- Luis Maldonado came on as Chief Product Officer, from dbt Labs.
- Bryan Abou-Rjaily joined as CRO after helping scale Snowflake from under $100M ARR to over $4.7B.
- Amy Miller joined from AWS as VP of Customer Success.
- Chuck Bear, formerly of Vertica, came in as Chief Architect.
That’s what the leadership bench looks like heading into the next phase.
What this recognition reflects
The Globe’s Tech Power Players list recognizes leaders shaping the future of technology in New England and beyond. Lynch’s inclusion signals that governed semantics are no longer a BI convenience. They’re the infrastructure that determines whether enterprise AI returns answers you can trust, or just answers that sound right.
The market spent three years catching up to that argument. It’s here now, and AtScale is positioned to deliver on it.
Explore the full 2026 Tech Power Players 50 list from The Boston Globe, available June 9. To see what AtScale is building and explore open roles, visit careers.atscale.com.
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Guide: How to Choose a Semantic Layer