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