21 Surprising Ideas About Semantic Layers, AI Agents, Generative AI, Business Intelligence, and Data Integration from the 2025 Semantic Layer Summit
A rolling thunder of big ideas from the 2025 Semantic Data Summit
Is business intelligence dying, or is it just getting started? How can AI best leverage enterprise data? What role do semantic layers play in the agentic applications, today and tomorrow?
Last week, a panel of prominent leaders explored these ideas at the 2025 Semantic Data Layer Summit. I attended the proceedings and was blown away by the insights and case studies shared by leaders from Snowflake, Databricks, IBM, Thoughtspot, Home Depot, and the host, Atscale, and more.
I harvested 21 topics from the session. There were so many cool ideas that I decided to share them one by one, day by day. This post is a “directory” of them — a rolling thunder of ideas from the summit. Each day, I’ll post a new idea and add it to this list (and share on LinkedIn, too).
Each post features a big idea from the summit, the conventional wisdom it debunks, a case study of the idea in action, and an explanation of how semantic layers help (if you’re new to semantic layers, read this or listen to episode #4 of the Techno Sapien podcast, Semantic Data 101).
Here we go!
21 Surprising Ideas About Semantic Layers, AI Agents, Generative AI, BI, and Data Integration from the 2025 Semantic Layer Summit
Preview (#0): The Great Semantic Layer Debate: Five Issues for AI Innovators
💡 Idea #1: Semantic Layers: BI’s Gift to AI
💡 Idea #2: Semantics Should Be In Your Database
💡 Idea #3: Semantics Should NOT Be In Your Database
💡 Idea #4: SQL is Dead. Long Live SQL
💡 Idea #5: AI is a Needle-Finder, Not an Answer-Giver
💡 Idea #6: Coming Soon!
💡 Idea #7: Coming Soon!
💡 Idea #8: Coming Soon!
💡 Idea #9: Coming Soon!
💡 Idea #10: Coming Soon!
💡 Idea #11: Coming Soon!
… You Get the Point…
Semantic Layer Summit Speakers
Dave Mariani. CTO and cofounder of AtScale
Josh Klahr. VP of Product for Snowflake's core platform & analytics
Bruno Aziza. VP of Data, BI, and AI, IBM
Ken Wong: Senior Director of Product, Databricks data warehousing and analytics
Francois Lopitaux, SVP and GM of Emerging Tech and Products, ThoughtSpot
Chris Lynch, CEO, AtScale
I’ll be writing about what these folks, and other shared - I‘m Mark Palmer, advisor and analyst for Warburg Pincus, Atscale, Dataiku, KX, Data Visualization Soceity, AI.One and Workfusion, and I track the data, analytics, and AI market.
For More on Semantic Layers
New to semantic layers? Read this or listen to episode #4 of the Techno Sapien podcast, Semantic Data 101):
And follow these Substacks and blogs:
- by Try: BI by Another Name
- by
Eugene Yan. Try: Evaluating the Effectiveness of LLM-Evaluators
- Try “The Great Semantic Layer Debate”