194 - AI for BI: Juan Sequeda on Preparing Your Analytics to Work With LLMs

194 - AI for BI: Juan Sequeda on Preparing Your Analytics to Work With LLMs

From Experiencing Data w/ Brian T. O’Neill by Brian T. O’Neill from Designing for Analytics

May 12, 2026 · 50 min · Episode 194

About this episode

Brian T. O’Neill interviews Juan Sequeda about integrating AI into analytics and the importance of aligning customer workflows with data models.

If you’re hoping that adding AI to your analytics product or capabilities is going to unlock new revenue, sales, and greater user adoption, but you’re not sure what’s involved in this transformation, this episode is for you! Today, I’m talking with Juan Sequeda today, an expert in knowledge graphs and ontologies who most recently was Head of the AI lab at data.world, which was recently acquired by ServiceNow. Juan and I met while speaking at CDOIQ a few years ago, and after being on his former podcast “Catalogs and Cocktails.” (With a name like that, I naturally had him out to my local tiki bar while visiting Cambridge!) Talk-to-your-data products – effectively next-gen business intelligence applications – are a hot topic right now, and this has made much of Juan’s PhD work in semantics highly relevant right now as companies try to make analytics more user-friendly via natural language. Juan is clear that the starting point for this transformation isn’t the model or the UI, but actually the customer’s workflow—and that was like music to my ears! Analytics only matters when it drives action, so the real challenge is not answering more questions, but enabling better decisions and…

People in this episode

Host: Brian T. O’Neill

Guest: Juan Sequeda

Topics covered

  • AI in analytics
  • business intelligence
  • knowledge graphs
  • user experience
  • decision making

Keywords

  • AI
  • analytics
  • business intelligence
  • knowledge graphs
  • semantics
  • natural language
  • user-friendly
  • decision making

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: data.world, ServiceNow

Books & works: Catalogs and Cocktails

More episodes of Experiencing Data w/ Brian T. O’Neill

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Experiencing Data w/ Brian T. O’Neill podcast page.