Post by Oleg Bascurov

Yesterday’s #Data4Breakfast in Düsseldorf was a reminder of how quickly the data and AI world is maturing. 🤖 AI is real. Most conversations circled around how AI helps businesses do more with less. Seeing #SnowflakeIntelligence in action at #Bertelsmann illustrated how more agentic analytics can truly democratize data and reduce dependence on central IT. At the same time, if a business controller sees a “data slop” even once, it can take a long time to rebuild trust in AI-powered analytics — trusted data is a prerequisite, but still not enough on its own to guarantee trusted results. 🧠 Semantic layer rules. The semantic layer now consumes a significant share of many data projects; it’s the grease agentic engines need to turn data into meaningful insights. For the time being, creating that layer is still a mix of human “brain dump” (capturing business logic and definitions) and AI-generated intelligence derived from the data itself. 🤝 Consulting vs Implementation. The joint story from #areto and #Fressnapf showed how they approached migrating from #SAPBW to #Snowflake to build a data lake that powers both existing and new business initiatives. True impact comes from combining technical depth, practical experience, and executive sponsorship. ⚙️ Shift to agentic development. The nature of consulting is shifting: from doing the implementation to helping customers use AI technology and AI-assisted implementation tools themselves. In the future, the most valuable consulting partners will not be the ones with the most attractive rate card, but those who can help customers build more on their own by leveraging powerful agentic dev tools like #CortexCode with only limited prior DevOps experience. 💬 How is your work changing as consulting moves from “we implement it for you” to “we help you make the most of agentic development tools inside your own teams”? Kudos to the presenters: Dominik Sprenger Matthias Prinzmeier Stephan Jennewein Axel Stoye 🚀 Annika Schanne Jan Mahler