From AtScale’s vantage point, the rise of AI copilots and assistants in the workplace is accelerating at a pace few predicted even two years ago. In 2025, a Gallup report found that as many as 40% of employees in the U.S. regularly use some form of AI at work, doubling the rate from just two years ago. In the Fortune 500, seven out of ten companies have already adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot, signaling how quickly these intelligent helpers are becoming part of the mainstream workday.
But here’s the catch: without business context, AI assistants may struggle to provide the consistent, reliable insights that teams depend on for critical decisions. They can generate plenty of output, but the true business value depends on whether they understand metrics, policies, and definitions the same way humans do. If the assistant can’t tell the difference between “bookings” and “revenues,” it may introduce more confusion than clarity.
That’s where AtScale sees an inflection point. AI copilots deliver their greatest value when grounded in a well-defined business foundation. A semantic layer provides that foundation — the shared language and consistent definitions that turn AI from a clever content generator into a reliable partner in decision-making. AtScale considers the semantic layer less of a technical add-on and more of a “corporate trainer” that these new AI coworkers desperately need.
The Rise of AI Coworkers
AI copilots are rapidly becoming standard features in business intelligence, analytics, and productivity tools. This isn’t just industry hype; the numbers tell a compelling story.
Gartner predicts that 40% of enterprise applications will feature task-specific AI agents by 2026, compared to less than 5% in 2025. Tools like GitHub Copilot have crossed 20 million all-time users, with a 400% growth in just one year — and the average user now relies on AI to write over 46% of their code.
With platforms like Power BI, Tableau, and Databricks integrating copilots and generative language models, AI assistants may help accelerate workflows and support decision-making for professionals in every department.
The Problem: AI Without Context
AI models improve the accuracy of their insights when equipped with company-specific context. Copilots can generate impressive text and quick analyses, but AI without context doesn’t inherently know what “revenue” or “customer churn” means to a specific organization.
For example, a finance copilot tasked with creating a revenue report may confuse gross revenue for net revenue if not trained on the company’s definitions. In turn, this contextual confusion may lead to inaccurate insights and conflicting reports across teams.
Bridging this gap with a clearly defined business context enables AI copilots to support more precise interpretations and consistent decisions. In high-stakes environments such as financial planning or regulatory compliance, any margin for error quickly becomes unacceptable.
AtScale’s own tests reveal just how large the gap can be. “In our own testing with TPC-DS, we found that large language models (LLMs) are incorrect over 80% of the time when left to their own devices. But when grounded in a semantic layer that encodes business logic, joins, metrics, and relationships, we achieved near 100% accuracy across tools like Databricks Genie and Snowflake Cortex Analyst,” says Dave Mariani, Founder and CTO of AtScale.
“The takeaway is clear: AI is only as useful as the context it understands. And that context lives in the semantic layer,” Mariani highlights.
Who Teaches the AI?
Bringing AI copilots onboard is a lot like hiring a new teammate. To contribute meaningfully, they need to learn the company’s vernacular, including which metrics matter most and how every number is calculated. But here’s the challenge: in most organizations, knowledge lives in too many places. There are siloed dashboards, scattered spreadsheets, analytics platforms, and “institutional knowledge” in the heads of domain experts.
AtScale sees this fragmentation as a major obstacle. If every team has its own definitions for “sales pipeline” or “churn,” copilots are vulnerable to confusion, mistakes, and inconsistent outputs. The more tools and data sources a business uses, the wider the gap becomes.
So, who teaches the AI? Who is responsible for giving copilots the trusted, consistent definitions they need to be reliable digital partners? For AtScale, the answer is clear: to turn AI copilots into confident contributors, organizations must invest in a unified semantic layer.
Enter the Semantic Layer: The AI’s Corporate Trainer
The semantic layer stands at the center of AtScale’s vision: it’s the corporate trainer for every AI copilot in the enterprise. Put simply, the semantic layer is a governed, universal framework for defining business data that ensures every tool, dashboard, and assistant draws from shared, trusted definitions rather than isolated pockets of “institutional knowledge.”
The AtScale semantic layer platform translates natural language questions and AI prompts into precise queries that better align with company data definitions. Copilots and large language models grounded by a semantic layer deliver more accurate results when interpreting enterprise data. Rather than guessing how to join tables or calculate a metric, copilots tap into codified business logic and relationships with greater reliability.
Key benefits of a semantic layer as the AI’s “corporate trainer” include:
- May help copilots interpret data more consistently across departments and tools.
- Supports alignment between all AI-generated outputs and business reality, so definitions like “gross margin” or “active user” remain consistent across teams.
- Can reduce the risk of conflicting answers from different systems or dashboards.
- Minimizes the risk of “hallucinations” in generative AI responses by embedding trusted business context into every AI workflow.
A semantic layer helps establish organization-wide trust and clarity in the age of agentic analytics.
Why It Matters Now
Organizations are scrambling to keep pace with the adoption of AI copilots. AtScale has witnessed this acceleration firsthand across enterprises adopting next-generation analytics platforms. For all their promise, copilots can deliver conflicting or incomplete answers when they lack a consistent business context. In turn, the real differentiator for effective AI copilots is access to rich context.
Establishing a semantic foundation allows AI copilots to provide the same reliable answers whether used in finance or marketing. This alignment is critical: when teams utilize consistent business definitions, they make faster, more confident decisions that support company-wide goals and compliance requirements.
As AtScale’s Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, Cort Johnson, states: “The organizations that get this right aren’t just implementing new technology — they’re building sustainable competitive advantages through faster, more intelligent decision-making.”
The Future of Work: Humans + AI + Semantic Context
The future of work is arriving, where humans and AI copilots collaborate side-by-side, making decisions, analyzing data, and driving innovation. AtScale’s vision is clear: copilots only become valuable coworkers when grounded in trusted business data definitions and context.
Semantic consistency is the foundation for a real partnership between people and intelligent assistants. As Mariani comments, “Semantics don’t belong in the warehouse or in the BI tool. They belong above them, ensuring every tool, every user, and every agent speaks the same language.”
With semantic layers in place, both humans and AI can ask questions, analyze trends, and share insights, always speaking the same business language. According to Cort Johnson, “From AtScale’s perspective, semantic layers are not just for BI — they are essential for onboarding every AI assistant into the enterprise.”
When copilots work from unified definitions, teams benefit from more dependable answers, streamlined collaboration, and better support for evolving work practices.
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