The Semantic Layer's New Job
Eighteen 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…
Blog
Four AI Pillars and a Wide-Open Opportunity
I 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…
The Architecture Decision That Lets Carrefour’s Metrics Power Both Google Sheets and AI Agents
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…
Semantic Layer Summit Keynote: What It Takes to Make AI Work in the Enterprise
Every enterprise AI conversation eventually runs into the same wall. Someone pulls up the output from an agent or a natural language query, and someone else in the room says, “That number doesn’t look right.”…
A Skill or README Isn't a Semantic Layer
Why not just give the agent a skill? A bunch of people asked this at this week’s Databricks Data + AI Summit . Write down what “revenue” means, drop the skill next to your data,…
It's Got to Be the Semantic Layer, Baby
AtScale’s Dave Mariani and Snowflake’s Carl Perry on why governed semantics, not a smarter LLM, is what makes AI agents trustworthy. For years, business intelligence ran on a human workaround. When two reports disagreed about…
How Anthropic's AI Accuracy Went from 21% to 95%
Anthropic’s data science and engineering team runs its internal analytics on Claude, and this week, they published the accuracy figures . Without a semantic layer , the answers were right 21% of the time. With…
Your AI Isn't Expensive. It's Guessing.
Inside a Tier 1 bank’s $9-million-a-year AI rediscovery tax, and the architectural fix that cut compute costs by as much as 21,903x. Every time an analyst at a Tier 1 bank asks, “What was revenue…
A Tech Power Player in the Year the Semantic Layer Broke Through
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…
Why Semantics, Not Metadata, Are the Key to Business Context for AI
Five queries. $17.93 with an unguided LLM. Less than a tenth of a cent with a semantic layer . That 21,000x cost gap, measured by the commercial banking division of a Tier 1 multinational bank,…