What AI Terms Mean for Analytics - Issue 308
The key BI and analytics AI glossary shaping analytics, data workflows, and decision-making.
Welcome to the Data Analysis Journal, a weekly newsletter about data science and analytics.
AI vocabulary is getting out of hand.
The industry (meaning the companies monetizing AI features) keeps taking old concepts, putting them in a fresh AI wrapper, and presenting them as if something historic just happened. That’s how a semantic layer becomes a “context layer.” Or text-to-SQL, which we’ve had forever, suddenly becomes “conversational.” Or automation becomes “agentic.” Or standard BI features become “AI-powered analytics.” Apparently, if you rename something confidently enough, it becomes innovation.
So before I go deeper into the AI for analytics series, I want to slow down and define some of the terms I’ll be using. This is the glossary I should have published before last week’s piece, Before You Build an Analytics Agent. Better late than never.
This one-pager is my attempt to keep us honest. Let’s separate the useful concepts we already know from the marketing fog, and make sure we’re aligned on what is generative, agentic, autonomous, or just the same old BI with a chatbot taped to it.
