In this episode of The Data Engineering Show, host Benjamin Wagner sits down with Chris Merrick, CTO and cofounder of Omni, to explore how AI is transforming the analytics stack and why keeping humans at the center of that transformation is critical to avoiding becoming just another middleware layer.


What You'll Learn:

- Why becoming "agentic middleware" would signal failure — and how to design analytics platforms that empower human decision-makers while leveraging AI as an accelerant rather than a replacement

- How to balance exploratory and governed analytics — the framework for combining ad-hoc AI-driven analysis with consistent, repeatable metrics that organizations depend on for decision-making

- The semantic layer as the intelligence backbone — why curating datasets and defining business terminology (like "uplift") at the semantic level enables both humans and AI agents to work effectively within guardrails

- How to avoid the "universal translator" trap — why attempting to abstract away database dialect differences creates more problems than it solves, and how to leverage SQL as the common language instead

- The feedback loop that makes AI smarter over time — how to automatically capture learnings from user conversations and feed them back into the system so your analytics layer evolves as your business evolves

- The next frontier: from analytics to true business intelligence — how incorporating unstructured data (Salesforce comments, marketing notes, etc.) alongside structured metrics unlocks deeper "why" questions about your entire organization


About the Guest(s)

Chris Merrick is a Co-founder and CTO at Omni, bringing extensive expertise in data engineering and analytics infrastructure. With a distinguished background spanning data pipeline architecture at Stitch (acquired by Talend) and product leadership at Looker, Chris has been instrumental in shaping modern data integration and business intelligence practices. In this episode, Chris discusses how Omni is revolutionizing analytics by combining human-centric design with AI-driven insights, while maintaining governance and semantic rigor across complex data ecosystems. His perspective on balancing agentic workflows with end-user empowerment provides essential guidance for organizations navigating the convergence of AI and analytics, making this conversation invaluable for data leaders, engineers, and analytics practitioners seeking to build intelligent, scalable data platforms.


Quotes
"We're building a trusted AI analytics platform for you to do everything from asking questions of your data, getting a trusted response, and then manipulating that, building dashboards from it." - Chris Merrick
"If Omni becomes agentic middleware, we will have failed." - Chris Merrick
"There's more than one mode of analytics—there's ad hoc exploratory analysis, and there's the governed version of analytics." - Chris Merrick
"We have business users logging into this platform with a lot of context about who they are, and that gives us a heck of a lot of context to give them a great data experience." - Chris Merrick
"You gotta curate the dataset that the human or the LLM is seeing if you want it to be able to use it effectively." - Chris Merrick
"Semantics exist at every layer of the stack—a database table has semantics, and you go up the stack and get more and more different semantics." - Chris Merrick
"Don't invent new languages—we don't wanna play that game because we're not language builders and it's not adding a whole lot of value." - Chris Merrick
"When you define something in Omni, it is relative to the database dialect that it is going to—we don't attempt to be a universal translator." - Chris Merrick
"The data that used to be the most useless for the BI tool—like long-form AE comments in Salesforce—is now all of a sudden the most interesting stuff." - Chris Merrick
"How do we pull unstructured data into the fold and make the system intelligent about the entire company, not just the tables in the warehouse?" - Chris Merrick
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Resources
LinkedIn Profiles:

• Chris LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/merrickchristopher
• Benjamin's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wagjamin
  
  

Company Websites:

• Firebolt: firebolt.io
• Omni: https://omni.co
  
  

Tools & Platforms:

• Stitch – ETL data pipeline tool (acquired by Talend)
• Talend – Data integration platform
• dbt (data build tool) – Data transformation and modeling tool
• Looker – Business intelligence and analytics platform
• Blobby – AI agent for analytics queries at Omni
• OSI (Open Semantic Interchange) – Standard for semantic model representation
  
  

Mentioned People:

• Chris Merrick – Co-founder at Omni
• Jamie – Co-founder at Omni
• Moshe – CTO (invented MDX), associated with database/semantic model work
  
  

The Data Engineering Show is brought to you by firebolt.io and handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so

Previous guests include: Joseph Machado of Linkedin, Metthew Weingarten of Disney, Joe Reis and Matt Housely, authors of The Fundamentals of Data Engineering, Zach Wilson of Eczachly Inc, Megan Lieu of Deepnote, Erik Heintare of Bolt, Lior Solomon of Vimeo, Krishna Naidu of Canva, Mike Cohen of Substack, Jens Larsson of Ark, Gunnar Tangring of Klarna, Yoav Shmaria of Similarweb and Xiaoxu Gao of Adyen.

Check out our three most downloaded episodes:

• Zach Wilson on What Makes a Great Data Engineer
• Joe Reis and Matt Housley on The Fundamentals of Data Engineering
• Bill Inmon, The Godfather of Data Warehousing