In a world where anyone can create a report with a prompt, the semantic model becomes the most important thing your analytics team maintains.
I can’t stress this point strongly enough. The ability to create a sprawling mess will be more available than ever before. It’s bad enough with Excel but things could become even worse with the AI multiplier applied.
If everyone can create reports, then the definitions, the logic, the single source of truth — that’s where the value is. That’s what stops twenty people creating twenty different versions of “revenue” and all of them being slightly wrong.
The semantic model was always important. But it was somewhat protected by the fact that creating reports was hard enough that most people didn’t do it. That protection is going away.
See also Perspective — what's unsaid and What does this mean for reports and dashboards.