Bridging Data and Decision-Making: AI's Role in Modern Analytics

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Aug 12, 2025

Lucas Thelosen and Drew Gilson, co-founders of Gravity, delve into the transformative impact of AI in data analytics. They discuss their creation of Orion, an autonomous data analyst designed to bridge data and decision-making. The conversation highlights how AI democratizes access to data insights for businesses of all sizes, allowing data analysts to focus on strategic tasks. They also emphasize the importance of accuracy and trustworthiness in AI-driven workflows, sharing insights on how companies can cultivate a data-driven culture.

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ANECDOTE

From Analyst To Early AI Builder

Lucas Thelosen started building his first AI in 2010 during the mortgage crisis and taught himself SQL to centralize models and reporting.
He moved from analyst roles into product and consulting, applying those learnings at Looker and Google.

ANECDOTE

Bootstrapping Data From E‑commerce

Drew Gilson scaled an e‑commerce business and built the software and systems to run operations out of a garage to a fulfillment center.
He discovered Looker and used it to replace multiple analysts, learning how to automate analytics work.

INSIGHT

Analytics Under‑Resourced At Most Firms

Lucas Thelosen observes most companies are under‑resourced in analytics and miss many valuable insights.
That creates a persistent last‑mile gap between data availability and business decisions.

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Summary
In this episode of the Data Engineering Podcast Lucas Thelosen and Drew Gilson from Gravity talk about their development of Orion, an autonomous data analyst that bridges the gap between data availability and business decision-making. Lucas and Drew share their backgrounds in data analytics and how their experiences have shaped their approach to leveraging AI for data analysis, emphasizing the potential of AI to democratize data insights and make sophisticated analysis accessible to companies of all sizes. They discuss the technical aspects of Orion, a multi-agent system designed to automate data analysis and provide actionable insights, highlighting the importance of integrating AI into existing workflows with accuracy and trustworthiness in mind. The conversation also explores how AI can free data analysts from routine tasks, enabling them to focus on strategic decision-making and stakeholder management, as they discuss the future of AI in data analytics and its transformative impact on businesses.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
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Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Lucas Thelosen and Drew Gilson about the engineering and impact of building an autonomous data analyst

Interview

Introduction
How did you get involved in the area of data management?
Can you describe what Orion is and the story behind it?
- How do you envision the role of an agentic analyst in an organizational context?
There have been several attempts at building LLM-powered data analysis, many of which are essentially a text-to-SQL interface. How have the capabilities and architectural patterns grown in the past ~2 years to enable a more capable system?
One of the key success factors for a data analyst is their ability to translate business questions into technical representations. How can an autonomous AI-powered system understand the complex nuance of the business to build effective analyses?
Many agentic approaches to analytics require a substantial investment in data architecture, documentation, and semantic models to be effective. What are the gradations of effectiveness for autonomous analytics for companies who are at different points on their journey to technical maturity?
Beyond raw capability, there is also a significant need to invest in user experience design for an agentic analyst to be useful. What are the key interaction patterns that you have found to be helpful as you have developed your system?
How does the introduction of a system like Orion shift the workload for data teams?
Can you describe the overall system design and technical architecture of Orion?
- How has that changed as you gained further experience and understanding of the problem space?
What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Orion used?
What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Orion?
When is Orion/agentic analytics the wrong choice?
What do you have planned for the future of Orion?

Contact Info

Lucas
- LinkedIn
Drew
- LinkedIn

Parting Question

From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Closing Announcements

Thank you for listening! Don't forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.__init__ covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The AI Engineering Podcast is your guide to the fast-moving world of building AI systems.
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Links

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA