The semantic layer is becoming the foundation for trusted agentic AI
Agentic AI is making the semantic layer an essential enterprise priority because headless agents asking thousands of questions simultaneously have zero tolerance for inconsistent data definitions.
This change is a core principle of a new partnership announced at the Snowflake Summit, according to Dave Mariani (pictured, right), chief technology officer of AtScale. The company, which developed the universal semantic layer category nearly 14 years ago, has partnered with Snowflake to deliver Semantic Views for XMLA Endpoints — an integration that connects Excel and Power BI directly to Snowflake data through a live semantic layer, activated with a single setup command. The move unlocks Snowflake’s semantic layer for millions of Excel users.
“You know LLMs, you want them to be creative,” Mariani said. “You want them to be creative because they’re your research assistant. You want them to explore the data, but you don’t want them to be creative about the definition of revenue or customer. You do not want them to be creative over your data. So there’s a realization that you want to compare the probabilistic nature of an LLM so it can be creative with the deterministic nature of a semantic query engine.”
