Standing on the high plains near South Pass, Wyoming, where the Oregon and Mormon trails once crossed, I look at the remnants of the 1800s gold rush and draw a direct line to the current AI boom.

Prukalpa Sankar, founder of Atlan, joins me to unpack the piece most AI projects are missing: context. We get into building an enterprise "second brain," why agents get abandoned in testing hell, and what it actually took to rebuild Atlan as an AI-native company.

Juan Sequeda joins me straight off a month of travel to unpack the real state of AI agents in the enterprise, the danger of a "semantic swamp," and why pragmatism beats pedantry every time in data architecture..

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Revify - surprise Snowflake bills? One customer cut theirs 50% in 48 hours.→ https://revify.com/demo

Ryan Dolley and I record from the historic Guardian Building in Detroit to talk about building a data career away from the coastal AI bubble, and why Detroit's comeback energy makes it a city worth watching.

🎙️ SPONSORS

Revify - surprise Snowflake bills? One customer cut theirs 50% in 48 hours.→ https://revify.com/demo

Back from months on the road across Asia, Europe, and the US, I unpack the mood I kept running into: uncertainty. Energy shocks, supply chain chaos, and AI upending the playbook for vendors and practitioners alike. Plus updates on my book and an upcoming Salt Lake City conference.

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This episode is sponsored by Revefi, who gives you full cost and performance visibility for Snowflake by warehouse, user, and workload. One team cut Snowflake costs ~50% across 711 warehouses in under 48 hours.

Book a demo at revefi.com/demo.

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Timestamps

0:00 — Intro & travel recap — Sets the stage: months of globe-trotting across Asia, Europe, and the US

1:10 — Global uncertainty & resource scarcity — Fuel/water shortages in Southeast Asia, flight cancellations in Europe, ripple effects of geopolitical tensions

5:30 — AI dominates every conversation — The #1 topic at conferences worldwide; vendors facing existential questions and forced to rethink everything (Atlan pivot, DuckDB agent idea)

10:14 — AI's impact on workers at every level — Senior practitioners gaining superpowers, juniors worried about jobs, leaders expected to do more with less

17:51 — Key takeaway: everyone feels behind — Even top AI insiders are uncertain; give yourself grace, upskill, and consider building something for yourself

20:38 — Announcements — Book drops July 27th, course coming, Practical Data Community Newsletter live, fall travel schedule (London, Paris, possible Salt Lake City conference)

Chris Tabb, founder of LEIT Data, joins me live at Confluent Current London to talk honestly about how AI agents are reshaping the consultancy business model, from billing structure to internal knowledge management.

Eric Weber makes the case that the feeling of falling behind in AI is mostly manufactured. We're miscalibrating what's true for the top 0.1% in San Francisco against everyone else. We get into judgment as the real bottleneck, and why so many people are quietly leaving corporate roles.

Tristan Handy and I unpack a shift coming to data infrastructure: within 12 months, the primary consumers of data won't be humans, they'll be AI agents. We dig into compute costs, "context stores," and why the industry shouldn't just build horses with wheels.

NOTE - Sorry for the edits in this video. I used Descript to edit out the umms and uhhs, and it was a bit too aggressive. Will make it less jarring in future videos. Thanks.

🎙️ SPONSORS

Fivetran - stop cobbling pipelines together. Set it, forget it, scale as you grow.→ https://fivetran.com

Revify - surprise Snowflake bills? One customer cut theirs 50% in 48 hours.→ https://revify.com/demo

Sanjay Agrawal, CEO of Revefi and co-founder of ThoughtSpot, joins me to talk about how AI agents are quietly driving unpredictable spikes in cloud data spend, and why most FinOps practices are built for a world that no longer exists.