The semantic layer is not a new idea. It has existed for decades, and for most of that time it operated quietly in the background, doing unglamorous but essential work: making enterprise data legible to the people who needed to act on it.
What has changed is not the concept. What has changed is the cost of getting it wrong.
In the BI era, a poorly governed semantic layer meant inconsistent dashboards and frustrated analysts. In the agentic AI era, it means autonomous systems making high-stakes…