Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Over the past year, nearly every data and analytics vendor has made the same argument: AI agents need business context. Give a model enterprise data without telling it how the business defines revenue, margin, or an active customer, and it will give confident answers to the wrong questions. I agree. But definitions alone are not enough.

Every few years, a mature technology finds an unexpected use that breathes new life into the data profession. Change data capture did it for data delivery, and cloud data warehouses did it for business analytics. You may think I’m going to wax lyrical about generative AI, but I’m actually thinking of a markup language that's “having a moment” thanks to generative AI.

With Claude Dashboards entering beta, Anthropic is making it possible for people to ask quick, exploratory questions about their business data and get a dashboard back. You don't need to write SQL or build a visualization. I think that's a good thing. We've spent years trying to make analytics more accessible, and anything that shortens the path from question to answer is progress. I'm increasingly asked what the future of business intelligence looks like when AI can do more of the analysis for us.

There's a conversation happening in a lot of data teams right now. It goes something like this: the lakehouse is clearly where things are heading, Apache Iceberg is becoming the format everyone wants to land in, and the AI use cases the business is asking for need clean, open, queryable data.

One message coming out of Dreamforce caught my attention: context is moving to the center of the enterprise AI conversation. Good. We’ve been arguing for a while that context is what turns AI from an impressive interface into something genuinely useful for the enterprise. Salesforce’s AIforce approach is about bringing its data, workflows, business logic, semantics, permissions, security, and governance into the places people increasingly want to work, including Claude and Slack.