Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Soccer is a game of stories, but the most fascinating stories are often buried deep inside the numbers. And this year on the world's biggest stage, the tournament has expanded by nearly 60% – traditional scouting reports and pundit hot-takes simply can't keep up with the sheer volume of new data. That’s why we’re looking at the tournament through a much wider lens.

I had the distinct pleasure of hosting a Snowflake Summit ‘26 session with Agustin “Augie” Del Rio, CEO and Founder of Gallus Insights, an analytics platform tailored specifically for mortgage lenders. As we sat down to discuss the future of analytics, one core truth echoed throughout the room: the most ambitious AI goals live or die by the quality of the underlying data.

Finance leaders are operating in one of the most demanding macro environments in recent memory. Interest rates are moving faster than most models anticipated, reshaping the cost of capital almost overnight. Supply chain fragility has also turned working capital management into a moving target, and geopolitical uncertainty is changing how you plan for the future. Yet for many finance functions, the analytics stack hasn't kept pace with that urgency.

Live from Snowflake Summit '26, tech leaders from around the globe gathered to discover how the world’s most innovative companies are making AI real for business. But few sessions delivered as much raw, practical insight as the one presented by Frankie Woodhead, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Thrive Learning. Heading up a fast-growing, £20m ARR LearnTech business that serves over 500 global customers and 5 million users, Woodhead didn't give a standard product pitch.

It's the day before your POC, and the embedded analytics demo still looks like it belongs to someone else. Your designer handed over a brand guide last week. Your developer has been buried in CSS variables ever since: cross-referencing token names, mapping changes across components, reloading the page after every tweak to see what broke. The UI is almost right. The nav color is close. The typography still isn't matching, but there's no time left.

Your data engineers have spent months getting your metric definitions right: revenue recognized the way finance approved it, churn calculated the way your exec team aligned on it, and pipeline logic that your rev ops team actually agrees on. And then a new tool arrives, and someone has to do it all again.

More business teams are doing their thinking inside Claude and ChatGPT than ever before. Research, planning, analysis, content: it's all happening inside LLM platforms now. But the moment someone needs an answer grounded in actual enterprise data, the workflow breaks. They leave the AI, open the BI tool, run the query, copy the result back. Context lost, momentum killed. That's the problem we set out to solve when we launched ThoughtSpot's Agentic MCP Server back in July.

Most teams deploying AI agents on their data are watching the wrong things. They check whether the query ran and whether the number looks plausible. When both checks pass, the agent gets credit for a correct answer, and the output flows into dashboards, decisions, and the next agent in the chain. There's a gap between those two checks and actual correctness, and it's where the expensive mistakes live. Getting to a correct answer requires more than a formally valid calculation.

4,096 Tasks completed 89.8% success rate 302 Active users 4× growth Jan→Mar 86 Agents deployed 73 built by engineers 72 days In production 15,896 messages Modern engineering teams face a familiar paradox: the bigger the system, the more time engineers spend managing the work rather than doing it. Bugs pile up faster than they can be triaged. PRs wait days for review. On-call engineers spend hours reproducing what someone already debugged six months ago.

In 1799, soldiers near Rosetta, Egypt, unearthed a stone carved with the same decree in three scripts: hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Ancient Greek. Because scholars already understood Greek, it unlocked a language—and with that, a civilization’s worth of knowledge that had been dark for over a millennium. We’re at a similar inflection point in enterprise data.