The Joe Reis Show

Hosted by Joe Reis

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Episodes

383

Latest episode

Jun 2026

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EN-US

About the show

What happens when a best-selling author and "recovering data scientist" gets a microphone? This podcast. I'm Joe Reis, and each week I broadcast from wherever I am in the world, sharing candid thoughts on the data, tech, and AI industry. Sometimes it's a solo rant. Other times, I'm chatting with the smartest people I know. If you're looking for an unfiltered perspective on the state of AI, data, and tech, you've found it.

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60 recent

June 11, 202652 min

The Missing Half of AI: Context, Agents, and the AI-Native Enterprise w/ Prukalpa Sankar (Atlan)

In this episode, I sit down with Prukalpa Sankar, the founder of Atlan, to discuss the missing piece that makes artificial intelligence actually useful in the enterprise: context. We dive deep into building the "second brain" of a company, the reality of agent development, and how to transition a traditional business into an AI-native organization. If you're looking to understand why your AI agents are getting abandoned in testing hell or how the roles of data and engineering are fundamentally shifting, this is the conversation for you. As always, we keep it practical and grounded. No hype, just education from the front lines of data architecture.What an Enterprise Context Layer Actually Is (Prukalpa's new article): https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-enterprise-context-layer-actually-prukalpa--avdqc/?trackingId=kq8lIdYdRnKsHu%2BdREYB3Q%3D%3DTimestamps01:15 - The missing half of AI: Contextual intelligence 02:15 - Reverse engineering business context and the second brain 05:06 - Escaping testing hell and hitting the 80% accuracy threshold for agents 07:54 - Simulating context for analytics use cases 11:34 - Does data quality matter for AI agents? 15:37 - Capturing tacit knowledge and human expertise 21:08 - The organizational chart of the future and "E-shaped" humans 26:26 - How Atlan transformed into a completely AI-native company 34:22 - Banning engineers from coding and the new mental model for work 39:05 - Societal resistance, historical context, and embracing technological change 46:00 - Optimism, childlike curiosity, and the path forward

June 9, 202651 min

Snowflake Summit 2026 Recap, Avoiding the Semantic Swamp, and more w/ Juan Sequeda

Juan Sequeda stops by after a massive month on the road to unpack the latest industry shifts, including takeaways from the Snowflake Summit. We dive into the real state of AI agents in the enterprise, separating the hype from the reality of adoption. We also explore the dangers of creating a "semantic swamp," (cousin of data swamps) the shifting landscape of vendor strategies with the rise of the modern monolith, and why data teams need to accept that getting work done (not data) is the true center of the universe. Finally, we discuss why pragmatism beats pedantry every time when building data architecture.🎙️ SPONSORSRevify - surprise Snowflake bills? One customer cut theirs 50% in 48 hours.→ https://revify.com/demo

June 5, 202613 min

Data Work in the Real World (Detroit Edition) w/ Ryan Dolley. Freestyle Fridays (June 5, 2026)

In this Freestyle Friday episode, Ryan Dolly and I record straight from the historic Guardian Building in downtown Detroit to talk about life, tech, and data outside the San Francisco bubble. We had an amazing time connecting at the Data in the D town hall and exploring a city undergoing massive revitalization. Detroit was once the Silicon Valley of its time, peaking at nearly 1.9 million residents. Now, the city has a tangible "comeback" energy, moving past its history of empty fields and boarded-up buildings to build something entirely new. We discuss why building a career away from the coasts offers incredible lifestyle advantages, especially if you want to avoid the hyper-focus on AI software tools and work with real-world physical assets like automotive, mobility, and robotics.I'm excited about Detroit's potential and plan to spend more time here.🎙️ SPONSORSRevify - surprise Snowflake bills? One customer cut theirs 50% in 48 hours.→ https://revify.com/demo

May 29, 202624 min

Notes From the Field: AI, Energy Shocks & the End of the Old Playbook. Freestyle Fridays (May 29, 2026)

It's been a few months on the road, bouncing through San Francisco a bunch, across Asia and Europe, and a quick stop in Detroit. In this audio-only Freestyle Friday I unpack what I've been seeing out there. If I had to pick one word for the mood worldwide, it's uncertainty: energy and supply shocks rippling out of the Middle East, fuel and resource shortages, flights getting canceled with no notice, and AI scrambling the playbook for vendors, practitioners, and leaders alike.I get into why so many data tooling companies are quietly having existential conversations, how Atlan tore its product down to rebuild AI-native (a full conversation with Prukalpa is coming next week), and a fun experiment I shipped this week with DuckDB Quack.I also dig into the split I keep seeing: senior practitioners getting superpowers while juniors face a brutal job market, leaders being asked to do far more with less, and why I think the industrial-age org chart is finally on its way out.Plus some personal updates: the new book is now targeting late July and a companion course is on the way.Finally, I'm mixing audio and video formats going forward (Freestyle Friday will probably be mostly audio), the Practical Data Community newsletter is live, and there's a Salt Lake City conference brewing for late January. Lots in the hopper...------------------This episode is sponsored by Revefi, who gives you full cost and performance visibility for Snowflake by warehouse, user, and workload. One team cut Snowflake costs ~50% across 711 warehouses in under 48 hours. Book a demo at revefi.com/demo.------------Timestamps0:00 — Intro & travel recap — Sets the stage: months of globe-trotting across Asia, Europe, and the US1:10 — Global uncertainty & resource scarcity — Fuel/water shortages in Southeast Asia, flight cancellations in Europe, ripple effects of geopolitical tensions5:30 — AI dominates every conversation — The #1 topic at conferences worldwide; vendors facing existential questions and forced to rethink everything (Atlan pivot, DuckDB agent idea)10:14 — AI's impact on workers at every level — Senior practitioners gaining superpowers, juniors worried about jobs, leaders expected to do more with less17:51 — Key takeaway: everyone feels behind — Even top AI insiders are uncertain; give yourself grace, upskill, and consider building something for yourself20:38 — Announcements — Book drops July 27th, course coming, Practical Data Community Newsletter live, fall travel schedule (London, Paris, possible Salt Lake City conference)

May 29, 202623 min

How AI Agents Are Changing the Data Consultancy Game w/ Chris Tabb (Confluent Current London 2026)

If you're a consultant and you're not using AI agents yet, your competitors are. No surprise, but they're delivering faster, cheaper, and better than ever.Chris Tabb, founder of LEIT Data, joins me live at Confluent Current London 2026 to talk honestly about how AI agents are reshaping the consultancy model, from billing structures and team rollouts, to building internal tribal knowledge and outpacing firms that are still staffing up the old way.Timestamps:0:33 — How Chris is Going Agentic1:56 — Token Maxing Leaderboards5:26 — AI Agents: Year-Over-Year7:08 — Tagile: Agentic Development9:00 — AI in Consultancy17:22 — Prompt Management & Context Quality

May 27, 202649 min

Why You Feel Behind in AI (And Aren't) w/ Eric Weber

Everyone in tech is telling you to go faster. Eric stepped away from his role to do the opposite.In this conversation, we get into why so many people feel like they're falling behind in AI, and why that feeling is mostly manufactured. Eric makes the case that we're miscalibrated: assuming what's true for the 0.1% (the SF AI inner circle) is true for the 10%, when by definition almost no one is keeping up with that group. We talk about why judgment, not throughput, is the real bottleneck right now, why most AI products feel boring even as code output explodes, what the "flatten the org" experiments are actually measuring (spoiler: yesterday's stock price), and why people are leaving corporate roles at a rate that's hard to ignore.We also get into the parts nobody wants to say out loud: layoffs by email, the gap between who people are in private vs. on LinkedIn, the ghost routines after you leave a job, and what walking around San Francisco actually feels like when every billboard is AI and every person you pass looks depleted.If you've felt the FOMO and wondered whether the problem is you or the framing, this one's for you.Eric Weber is a data and product leader formerly at Grammarly, Yelp, LinkedIn, and Stitch Fix.

May 20, 202647 min

Why AI Agents Are the New Consumers of Data with Tristan Handy (CEO @dbt Labs)

In this episode, Tristan Handy and I sit down to unpack a massive shift coming to the data industry: over the next 12 months, the primary consumers of data won't be humans. They will be AI agents. We dive deep into what this means for data infrastructure, compute costs, and the tools we use every day. We also talk about processing high-volume agent queries, building "context stores", and why the industry shouldn't just build "horses with wheels" when designing agentic data engineers. We also take a fun detour comparing the current AI landscape to the early days of dial-up modems and Mosaic browsers , and discuss why stepping away from the screen and going old-school might be the ultimate productivity hack.

May 15, 202616 min

Why 90% of Data Teams Are Failing at Modeling - Freestyle Friday (May 15, 2026)

NOTE - Sorry for the edits in this video. I used Descript to edit out the umms and uhhs, and it was a bit too aggressive. Will make it less jarring in future videos. Thanks.Freestyle Friday, May 15, 2026Walking around Salt Lake City and unpacking the April 2026 data modeling survey results (334 respondents). Across three surveys now: January's State of Data Engineering (1,100), March's AI usage poll (193), and April's data modeling deep-dive. Not surprisingly, the same two pain points keep surfacing: time pressure and lack of clear ownership.90% of respondents have a data modeling pain point. When asked what would actually help, only 4.8% wanted better tools. Training, business requirements, time, and ownership crushed tooling in the rankings. Will AI improve things or make them worse? Time will tell...Also covered:Why physical data modeling has become the default (and why that's a problem)Data modeling vs. schema design - they're not the same thingSemantic layers (yay or nay?), Lloyd Tabb, and MalloyConway's Law, Reis's Law, and what changes when org charts get flattened by AIWhy leadership is under more pressure than everThe June half-year survey is coming🎙️ SPONSORSFivetran - stop cobbling pipelines together. Set it, forget it, scale as you grow.→ https://fivetran.comRevify - surprise Snowflake bills? One customer cut theirs 50% in 48 hours.→ https://revify.com/demo

May 14, 202652 min

The Hidden Costs of AI Agents & Cloud Data with Sanjay Agrawal (Revefi, co-founder ThoughtSpot, MS)

Are AI agents silently draining your cloud data budget? With the rise of consumption-based pricing and autonomous AI queries, data teams are facing a perfect storm of skyrocketing costs and operational chaos. In this episode, I sit down with Sanjay Agrawal, CEO and Co-founder of Revefi, to discuss the intersection of data engineering, cloud warehouse optimization, and FinOps in the age of AI.We chat about how legacy on-prem habits are bankrupting modern data platforms, why query optimization is more about ROI than just speed, and how AI agents are changing the landscape of data consumption. Sanjay shares his deep expertise from building world-class databases at Microsoft and ThoughtSpot, revealing how to automate cost management and performance tuning for Snowflake, Databricks, and BigQuery.Key Topics:The evolution of cloud data warehouse pricing and why it breaks traditional budgets.How AI agents are causing massive, unpredictable spikes in compute spend.Real-world horror stories of ""lift and shift"" cloud migrations.Why database benchmarks focus on speed but ignore the actual ROI of data.The future of open table formats (Iceberg) and multi-engine routing.

May 9, 202610 min

Zach Wilson - Data Engineering in 2026, Traveling, and more - Freestyle Fridays - May 8, 2026

Zach Wilson and I happen to be in Stockholm, Sweden, this evening. In this Freestyle Friday chat, we talk about what it takes to be a data engineer in 2026 and much more.