Dave Mariani

April 27, 2026

Google 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…

April 24, 2026

Executive 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…

April 16, 2026

Retailers 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…

April 9, 2026

AI 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…

April 1, 2026

The semantic layer has moved from niche infrastructure to a boardroom priority. Snowflake announced one. Databricks announced one. Google repositioned Looker as one. Microsoft repositioned Power BI as one. This is genuinely good news. As ISG analyst Matt Aslett observed…

March 26, 2026

Most enterprises have already standardized where their data lives. What they haven’t standardized is how that data is interpreted. Power BI and Excel users still rely on a workaround: moving data out of Snowflake into extracts, cubes, or Microsoft Fabric…

March 17, 2026

In modern data architectures, analytics tools often replicate data from the warehouse into secondary systems to improve performance. While this can speed up dashboards, it introduces new problems: duplicated datasets, inconsistent metrics, fragmented governance, and rising cloud costs. Modern analytics…

March 12, 2026

Gartner opened the Data & Analytics Summit 2026 with a memorable metaphor. The keynote framed the current moment as a raft ride through a roaring, treacherous river. The river represented AI. Fast-moving. Powerful. Difficult to control. The message was clear.…

March 11, 2026

A logistics company deploys an AI agent to monitor inventory and automatically trigger reorders. The model is solid. The prompts are well-engineered. The agent connects to their analytics environment and starts running. Three weeks in, it fires a reorder for…

March 5, 2026

I've been in the BI and data space long enough to recognize when something fundamental shifts. Denny Lee and I first worked together when he was at Microsoft on SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), and I was a customer building…

February 25, 2026

Most enterprise AI conversations still center on prompts, whether through chat interfaces, copilots, or question-answer workflows. But the highest-value AI agents don’t wait for someone to ask a question. They monitor signals, detect thresholds, and trigger actions. These are headless…

February 20, 2026

Many teams assume they’re doing agentic analytics because they support text-to-SQL or chat-based BI. And while conversational BI does change how questions are asked, it doesn’t go so far as to change how decisions are made. It’s like transitioning from…