Everyone's buzzing about GenAI. It can spin up code in seconds, draft blog posts, design images, and even simulate conversations with your favorite philosopher. The promise is intoxicating: faster work, less friction, new creative horizons.
But in the world of analytics, GenAI has a fatal flaw. It's missing the one thing that matters most: context. And without it, the dream of "just ask your data a question" collapses fast.
The Promise of GenAI in Analytics
Imagine a business user asking:
"What are the top 5 LTO items our platinum buyers purchased during the last quarter?"
In the ideal GenAI-powered world, the system instantly pulls the right data, applies the right business rules, and delivers a crisp, trusted answer — no SQL, no dashboards, no middleman.
That's the vision. And it's a powerful one. But today's GenAI systems struggle to get there.
The Accuracy Trap
Here's the problem: GenAI is designed to create. In marketing or brainstorming, "close enough" is fine. But in analytics, close enough kills trust.
- If the AI makes up a metric, adoption dies.
- If the AI fudges a calculation, credibility tanks.
With a traditional semantic layer you probably can mitigate the first two (through heavy manual intervention), but how do we define business logic and concepts like "platinum customer" or "LTO items?" That is the business context that needs to accompany the simple data and calculation aspects.
The simple truth is that if leaders don't trust the answers, they won't act on them. Without trust, all the hype in the world won't push GenAI into the analytics stack.
The Missing Ingredient: Context
Data only becomes insight when it is applied in the context of your business logic and rules.
The old-school semantic layer was a good start. Business Objects, EDWs, star schemas — all tried to translate messy database tables and columns into business-friendly terms. They worked, were time consuming to set up, but only benefited analysts who have the business experience, logic, rules and know-how to correctly frame questions and interpret the results in the right context.
GenAI doesn't fix this. In fact, it makes it worse. Out of the box, it probably won't even have any idea that CUST_NME in the CUSTOMER table is Customer Name or that INV_AMT is the Sales Amount on the INVC TABLE. It won't have any idea about joins and cardinality between CUSTOMER, INVOICE and PRODUCT tables. Meaning it more than likely will get the SQL wrong.
On top of that, as discussed above, business logic and rules and concepts are not part of the GenAI training and this is the main ingredient to turn the data into a relevant and useful business insight. If we want to get GenAI closer to the business decisioning assistant or co-pilot, then bringing a deep understanding of the data and relationships inside the data combined with your documented business know-how, logic and rules is a must have.
The Future: Context-Aware GenAI
The future isn't GenAI in a vacuum. It's GenAI with guardrails.
- Business rules.
- Standard business metrics.
- Relationships between entities.
- Governance baked in.
That's what unlocks accuracy, consistency, and trust. Only then can GenAI become the front door to analytics.
How Codd AI Fits In
At Codd AI, we're building exactly that.
- Automated semantic layer creation: GenAI accelerates the discovery of entities, joins, and metrics.
- Embedded business context: Business logic isn't bolted on later — it's baked into the semantic layer and activated via an intelligent query agent.
- Trustworthy interactions: Ask in plain English, get governed, explainable answers.
- 70% faster time-to-insight: No endless backlogs, no armies of data engineers.
- Non-invasive: Works with your existing data platforms, AI models and BI tools.
It's the Data-to-Human-to-AI bridge — finally delivering on the promise of conversational analytics without sacrificing trust.
Closing Thought
GenAI will change the way we interact with data. But unless it learns business context first, it's destined to fail in analytics.
At Codd AI, we believe the next frontier isn't just AI that talks — it's AI that understands.
👉 Ready to move beyond dashboards into conversational, trustworthy insights? Watch our demo videos or Schedule a demo.