The operator already owned the data lake. What he did not own was a way to ask the lake anything without routing the question through a vendor and waiting for the answer to come back.
He had the data lake. That was not the problem.
The problem was that every data need routed through a vendor. Any query, any fix, any question meant reaching out and waiting. Dashboard access was limited to whatever views already existed, so anything outside them meant going back through the vendor again. Direct work meant querying the warehouse by hand through a database client.
The cost was not only time. Credibility was exposed. Franchisees would catch errors in the numbers, in public, in front of other franchisees.
“Every data question used to come to Rayson and wait. Now I answer them in the meeting.” 1
An off-the-shelf cloud assistant from the warehouse vendor. It returned nonsensical answers more than half the time, because it had no context and no semantic model underneath it. Beyond that, he found nothing viable.
“We tried the warehouse vendor's own assistant. More than half the time it gave us answers that made no sense, because nothing underneath it understood our data.”
senti is the first stop for data questions from across the organization.
Beyond the operator himself, regional directors now reach a body of information that was previously out of their hands entirely.
“My regional directors can get to information that was completely out of reach for them before.”
What he emphasised: the pace of development, and that contextual accuracy has improved release over release.
“I can validate a number live, in front of owners, instead of promising to follow up.”
Any mid-size organisation, franchise system, or multi-unit operation aggregating data. Especially relevant to anyone standing up a data lake, and to anyone trying to avoid the cost of dedicated technical hires. His framing is that owning your data is the first step and senti is what lets you scale quickly from there.
One hour, your warehouse, your question. You leave with the answer and the trace behind it.
1 Wording attributed to the operator is proposed from his account of the deployment and is pending his approval; the source material is a summarised set of notes, not a transcript. 2 Dashboards described here are built by the customer from queries senti produced. senti does not export to BI tools.