AI Broke the
Data Stack
The data world is melting, mutating, and morphing into something entirely new.
Every tool is launching its AI analyst. Semantic layers are back as AI infrastructure. Context graphs are the talk of the town. The Great Data Debate 2026 is where founders, thought leaders, and builders who are navigating this chaos firsthand confront the biggest questions facing data & AI today.
The AI Analyst — Will It Kill 70% of Dashboards by 2026?
This debate brings together the people who’ve defined BI’s past, are building its future, and are watching AI expose its cracks:
• Cindi Howson, who helped shape how the world evaluates BI platforms at Gartner and Thoughtspot
• Barry McCardel, who’s building the future of BI for an AI-native world at Hex
• Tristan Handy, who changed how data teams think about semantics and transformation at dbt Labs and RJMetrics
• Shubham Bhargav, who’s in the trenches building talk-to-data at the world’s biggest enterprises
Session Panelists✨
Cindi Howson
Chief Data & AI Strategy Officer, ThoughtSpot
Cindi Howson has lived through every era of BI—and helped define most of them. From leading Gartner’s BI Magic Quadrants to advising global enterprises at ThoughtSpot, she brings a rare, long-range view of how BI actually evolves.
Barry McCardel
Co-founder & CEO, Hex
Barry represents the future-first view of analytics. At Hex, he’s rebuilding BI for a world where AI is the default — not an add-on. He questions whether dashboards deserve to survive at all, and what analytics should look like when humans and AI collaborate in real time.
Tristan Handy
Co-founder & CEO, dbt Labs
Before dbt, Tristan built RJMetrics, an early BI platform that lived across the stack, long before the “modern data stack” existed. With dbt, he redefined how data teams work and as the longtime author of the Analytics Engineering Roundup, Tristan has maintained a longitudinal view of how analytics tools evolve.
Shubham Bhargav
Product & Engineering, Atlan
Shubham is in the trenches building talk-to-data systems with enterprises today. He brings real-world lessons from attempting to operationalize AI analysts — including where they succeed, where they hallucinate, and why context is the limiting factor.
Context Graphs: The Next $1T Opportunity — But Who Owns Them?
Everyone agrees AI needs context. Nobody agrees on where it should live. This debate brings the divergent, leading perspectives together:
• The System of Data — represented by Bob Muglia, former co-founder of Snowflake
• The System of Record — represented by Karthik Ravindran, GM of Azure at Microsoft
• The System of Agents — represented by Tony Gentilcore, co-founder of Glean
• The Universal Context Layer — represented by Prukalpa Sankar, co-founder of Atlan
• The Origin Story — represented by Jaya Gupta, author of the viral essay Context Graphs: AI’s Trillion-Dollar Opportunity
Session Panelists✨
Bob Muglia
Former CEO, Snowflake
As former CEO of Snowflake and a longtime Microsoft executive, Bob has built and scaled the platforms modern data runs on. Bob represents the System of Data perspective: if context becomes core infrastructure, warehouses and data platforms are the natural gravity well.
Prukalpa Sankar
Co-founder, Atlan
As co-founder of Atlan, Prukalpa has worked across hundreds of enterprises to understand where context actually lives: in metadata, lineage, ownership, policies, and usage — not inside any single tool. She believes that context must be exist as a universal, independent layer.
Karthik Ravindran
GM, Enterprise Data & AI, Microsoft
Karthik represents the hyperscaler reality as GM of Azure Data, which embeds ontology and context into cloud systems like Fabric IQ. Karthik represents the System of Record and challenges whether independent context systems can truly keep up.
Jaya Gupta
Partner, Foundation Capital
Jaya frames context as AI’s trillion-dollar unlock in the viral essay that made context graphs unavoidable: Context Graphs: AI’s Trillion-Dollar Opportunity. She brings an investor’s clarity to where durable value actually compounds when it comes to context.
Tony Gentilcore
Co-founder, Glean
Tony Gentilcore is Co-founder and Product Engineering Lead at Glean. With 20+ years building high-performance products, he spent a decade at Google modernizing Search and later led the Chrome Speed Team, shaping how data is accessed and delivered at scale.
