Orion at Gravity: Trustworthy AI Analysts for the Enterprise

About this episode

Lucas Thelosen and Drew Gilson discuss their AI analyst Orion and its impact on enterprise analytics.

Summary  In this episode of the Data Engineering Podcast, Lucas Thelosen and Drew Gilson, co-founders of Gravity, discuss their vision for agentic analytics in the enterprise, enabled by semantic layers and broader context engineering. They share their journey from Looker and Google to building Orion, an AI analyst that combines data semantics with rich business context to deliver trustworthy and actionable insights. Lucas and Drew explain how Orion uses governed, role-specific "custom agents" to drive analysis, recommendations, and proactive preparation for meetings, while maintaining accuracy, lineage transparency, and human-in-the-loop feedback. The conversation covers evolving views on semantic layers, agent memory, retrieval, and operating across messy data, multiple warehouses, and external context like documents and weather. They emphasize the importance of trust, governance, and the path to AI coworkers that act as reliable colleagues. Lucas and Drew also share field stories from public companies where Orion has surfaced board-level issues, accelerated executive prep with last-minute research, and revealed how BI investments are actually used, highlighting a shift…

People in this episode

Host: Tobias Macey

Guests: Lucas Thelosen, Drew Gilson

Topics covered

• trustworthy AI
• agentic analytics
• semantic layers
• data governance
• business insights
• AI in enterprise

Keywords

• AI analysts
• data semantics
• business context
• dynamic decisions
• role-specific agents
• context management
• technical debt

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Gravity, Looker, Google

Products: Orion

Places: public companies

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