At Snowflake Summit last week, AtScale Chief Product Officer Luis Maldonado sat down with Ravit on The Ravit Show to talk about the announcement everyone at the conference was asking about, and the deeper problem it’s designed to solve.
The announcement: Power BI and Excel, meet Snowflake Semantic Views.
Together with the Snowflake Semantic Views team, AtScale launched the XMLA endpoint for Snowflake Semantic Views, a first-of-its-kind embedded capability that connects Power BI and Excel directly to governed Snowflake metrics. No data mirroring. No recreating business logic outside Snowflake. The same certified metrics that power Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex Agents are now accessible from the tools millions of analysts already use every day.
“There are millions of Power BI and Excel users. Right now, many of them feel left out if they can’t connect into a semantic layer. This solves that.”
– Luis Maldonado, CPO AtScale
Watch the full interview here:
The bigger issue: context is everywhere, but consistency isn’t.
“Context” was the word of the week at Snowflake Summit. It was at every booth and in every session. But as Maldonado pointed out, context without consistency is just noise.
Most enterprise AI journeys start in BI, with teams already struggling to keep metric definitions aligned across tools and teams. Agents multiply that problem. When a swarm of agents is operating on different answers, the downstream effects compound fast. Governance has to be the foundation once agents start taking action. Maldonado said:
“If I’m going to let these agents run and take action for me, I’ve got to make sure they’re building on real answers.”
Semantic Views vs. AtScale Enterprise: which one is right for you?
Maldonado also clarified the distinction between the two offerings. The XMLA endpoint is a fully embedded capability within Snowflake Semantic Views, no additional infrastructure required.
For customers who need a universal semantic layer across multiple data platforms, MCP server connectivity, and more complex modeling, AtScale Enterprise is the path. And critically, customers who start with Semantic Views can extend to Enterprise without losing what they’ve built. AtScale runs natively in Snowflake Container Services.
The bottom line.
The biggest challenge with enterprise AI is trust. To build trust, you need consistent answers: the same gross margin in the dashboard, the spreadsheet, and the agent response. That’s what this announcement delivers.
The XMLA endpoint for Snowflake Semantic Views is heading into private preview. Reach out to your Snowflake rep or visit snowflake.atscale.com to learn more and sign up.
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