AI Paradigm Shift: Analytics Without SQL

The idea of “asking data questions in plain English” has been around for a while, but most implementations never made it into production in a serious way. The usual reason is not the language model itself but everything around it: security boundaries, schema ambiguity, cost control, and the fact that analytics systems are rarely clean enough for unconstrained natural language to work reliably. What has changed in the last couple of years is not that natural language is suddenly perfect, but that data platforms have started bringing computation, metadata, and AI into the same controlled environ