---
title: "Operationalizing AI analysts"
url: "https://atlan.com/great-data-debate-2026/operationalizing-ai-analysts/"
description: "The panel digs into who's responsible when an AI analyst gives a wrong answer, and what happens to human analysts as simpler questions get automated."
keywords: "atlan, data governance"
---

> Atlan is hosting Context Conference, bringing together the leaders and builders at the frontier of giving AI the context it needs to understand their business. It runs online on October 28, 2026, from 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM ET. Atlan co-founder Prukalpa Sankar opens and closes the day. Leaders from AstraZeneca, BNY and Verizon share why they invest in context and what they get from it. Registrants get early access to The AI Context Gap, a new study from MIT Technology Review Insights. Register: https://atlan.com/context-conference/

**A highlight clip from The Great Data Debate 2026 (AI Broke the Data Stack), Session 1, The AI Analyst: Will It Kill 70% of Dashboards by 2026?** The video plays on the page: [watch at https://atlan.com/great-data-debate-2026/operationalizing-ai-analysts/](https://atlan.com/great-data-debate-2026/operationalizing-ai-analysts/).

The panel digs into who's responsible when an AI analyst gives a wrong answer, and what happens to human analysts as simpler questions get automated.

## Speakers

- **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.
- **Chris Child**, VP of Product Management, Snowflake. Chris brings the perspective of building the AI analyst for Snowflake. As VP of Product, he's responsible for making AI analytics work where the data actually lives, with initiatives like Snowflake Intelligence, Cortex, and Open Semantic Interchange.
- **Cindi Howson**, Chief Data & AI Strategy Officer, ThoughtSpot. Cindi 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 long-range view of how BI actually evolves.
- **Tony Gentilcore**, Co-founder, Glean. 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.
- **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.

## Related resources

- Highlight: [Who will own the context layer?](https://atlan.com/great-data-debate-2026/who-owns-context/)
- Highlight: [Context engineering and the future of data engineering](https://atlan.com/great-data-debate-2026/context-engineering/)
- Highlight: [Composition of context](https://atlan.com/great-data-debate-2026/composition-of-context/)
- Highlight: [How do you actually build an enterprise context graph?](https://atlan.com/great-data-debate-2026/building-context-graphs/)
- Highlight: [Why is context the next trillion dollar opportunity?](https://atlan.com/great-data-debate-2026/trillion-dollar-opportunity/)
- Highlight: [Challenges in bridging the context gap](https://atlan.com/great-data-debate-2026/challenges-context/)
- Highlight: [Semantic layers and context for AI analysts](https://atlan.com/great-data-debate-2026/context-for-ai-analysts/)
- Highlight: [What different roles do AI analysts and dashboards play in analytics?](https://atlan.com/great-data-debate-2026/purpose-of-ai-analysts-and-dashboards/)

All recordings: [The Great Data Debate 2026](https://atlan.com/great-data-debate-2026/).