Semantics Without Silos: AI Finally Solves BI’s Oldest Problem

Business intelligence has always been good at telling you what happened. It's never been great at telling you what to do about it. In this episode, AtScale's CEO and co-founder Dave Mariani sits down with Donald Farmer, Principal of Treehive Strategy, to talk about why AI is finally closing that gap.

You'll get Donald's take on:

• How AI will start to take over the exploratory, discovery side of analytics
• Why "revenue" means something different to marketing, sales, and finance ,  and why semantic layers need to model relationships between data, not just definitions
• How treating semantic models like code (Git, CI/CD, AI-generated YAML) lets business users build them without needing to be a "unicorn"
• What Apache Ossie tells us about the industry's shared need for semantic standardization
• Donald's advice for enterprises and software vendors trying to figure out their AI strategy right now

Key topics in this episode:

• The future of BI: routine dashboards vs. AI-driven discovery
• Marcia Bates' model of "browsing" (orientation, glimpsing, examination, acquisition) and where BI always fell short
• Semantic layers as the foundation for AI trust and governance
• AI as translator, not just code generator, for building semantic models
• Vendor lock-in, Apache Ossie, and Apache Iceberg as pieces of an open, portfolio-based data stack
• Donald's "go carefully, but go" advice for AI adoption