Data for AI: Access to Understanding
Your agent can reach every table in the lakehouse. It still doesn't know what "active user" means, which of your three revenue columns is the real one, or that two teams define churn two different ways.
That's the theme for our next Data for AI meetup: semantics. We're getting into ontologies, semantic layers, and the open standards taking shape around them (including OSI, the Open Semantic Interchange) that give agents a shared, machine-readable understanding of what your data actually is, not just where it lives.
The talks
Four practitioner talks that run the whole arc, from what breaks to how you fix it live to how you govern it at scale.
The Agent Had Access to Everything and Understood Nothing · Ganesh Nathan, Co-founder and Principal Architect, Autolake. A production war story: perfect permissions, lineage, and governance, and an agent that still returned confidently wrong numbers. What the team got wrong and what stuck.
Missed Connections: Giving AI Agents the Context and Ontologies They Need · Ben Squire, Neo4j. One question answered three ways: naive Text2SQL, then a graph semantic layer, then an ontology with reasoning tools. Live demo, all open source.
The Knowledge Spine: A Machine-Executable Ontology for Governed Marketing Activation · Ananth Packkildurai, Zeta Global (author of Data Engineering Weekly). Ontology as executable governance: consent, suppression, and frequency rules an agent can't talk its way past.
Building a "Company Brain": Giving AI Agents Shared Enterprise Context · Dave Nielsen, cognee. What it takes to create a company mind out of your organization's scattered knowledge, shown with a live demo.
The executive panel: Semantics & Ontology for AI Agents
"Active user" doesn't mean the same thing to the exec who asks for it and the engineer who builds it, and shorter dev cycles make the drift worse. Leaders from enterprises and startups on how to keep every layer of the business agreeing on what data means:
Ron Gonzalez, VP of AI/ML & Data Lakehouse, WEX
Yan Qu, Director of Data and AI, Intuit
Alex Hu, EVP of Engineering, Salesforce
Mark Hoerth, Product Lead, Datastrato
Ofer Mendelevitch, Head of Developer Relations, Credible Data
Plus Q&A and the hallway track, with food and drinks on us.
Built for data engineers, AI/ML engineers, platform architects, and the leaders they build for. Seats are capped, so grab your spot now.
The CFP for this edition is closed. Want to be on stage at a future Data for AI? Email adi@datastrato.ai.
Keep the conversation going
The best threads from these meetups don't end at the venue. Join the community on Discord to swap notes with speakers and other builders between events.
Want to help us run the event?
Data for AI is community-run, and a couple of extra hands make every meetup better. If you can help with check-in, setup, AV, or photos and video on the night, we'd love to have you: Open Google Form
Sponsors
This event is made possible by our sponsors, who keep the Data for AI community running.
Datastrato is the company behind Apache Gravitino, the open-source metadata lake that puts tables, models, and files under a single catalog, lineage graph, and access layer. They are building the open data fabric platform to accelerate trusted AI, and host the Data for AI community. More at datastrato.ai.
Neo4j is the graph database behind many of the world's knowledge graphs. Its native property-graph engine and Cypher query language make relationships a first-class citizen, which is why teams reach for it on connected-data problems and, increasingly, GraphRAG for grounding LLMs. More at neo4j.com.
WeAreDevelopers is the global platform for developers and AI professionals to grow, connect, and lead in the age of AI.
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Companies partner with us to reach developers authentically, strengthening their employer brand, engaging top talent, and showcasing their products to a global network. Join us on Sept 23-25 in San Jose for WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America
About SVAI
The Silicon Valley AI Hub (SVAI) is where developers, startups, and business leaders come together to build what's next in AI. See more SVAI Events.
Want to reach the Data for AI community with your brand? E-mail adi@datastrato.ai.