S2 Ep7: Are Data Lakes Drying Up?
From The Mostly Unstructured Podcast by The Mostly Unstructured Podcast
May 13, 2026 · 38 min · Season 2 · Episode 7
About this episode
This episode discusses the evolving role of data lakes in enterprise AI and the importance of the semantic layer.
Data lakes remain sources of truth, but AI accesses data beyond what lives in a lake to acquire valuable metadata and semantic understanding. In this episode of the Mostly Unstructured Podcast, KeyMark CMO Clay Tuten sits down with Josh Heller of Crushable.ai , to dismantle the myth that a lake has to be the final resting place of data. Read the companion article for info on data at rest vs data in motion, and integration tactics: https://www.keymarkinc.com/have-the-best-practices-for-data-integration-changed/ TOPICS COVERED IN THIS EPISODE: • What separates a data warehouse from a data lake? • Why the semantic layer is the most underrated shift in enterprise AI right now? • How AI vectorizes unstructured data — and why that changes the data-readiness conversation? • The difference between access and storage and which matters more? • How do "conversational data queries" replace legacy BI dashboards across every level of an org? QUESTIONS THIS EPISODE ANSWERS: • Is a data lake still necessary for enterprise AI? • How do you operationalize data not in a lake? • What is a semantic layer? • How do you know when your data foundation is good enough to move forward with AI? • What…
People in this episode
Host: Clay Tuten
Guest: Josh Heller
Topics covered
- data lakes
- enterprise AI
- semantic layer
- data governance
- data integration
- unstructured data
Keywords
- data lakes
- AI
- semantic layer
- data governance
- data integration
- unstructured data
- conversational data queries
- enterprise leaders
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Crushable.ai, KeyMark, KeyMark Inc.
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