Alexander Arvidsson

For years I thought dimensional models were about organizing data and making queries fast. That’s true, but it’s profoundly incomplete. Dimensional models describe how we store facts. They don’t describe what those facts mean. That gap shows up the moment someone asks a question your star schema wasn’t designed for. Ontologies solve a different problem: formal, machine-readable definitions of business concepts and their relationships. With Microsoft now shipping Fabric IQ, this conversation isn’t academic anymore.

Describe your chosen architecture to your AI assistant and ask what it thinks. Odds are, it’ll tell you the approach is sound. But a 2025 Stanford study found AI models affirm users 47% more than humans do, even when the user is clearly wrong. Worse: people who got sycophantic responses trusted the AI more and were more likely to return. The version that damaged their judgment was the one they liked best. This is Goodhart’s Law in your feedback loop.

Your AI policy was written for someone who doesn’t work on your team.Your AI policy was written for someone who doesn’t work on your team. Probably for someone who doesn’t exist. Part 2 of this series moves from research to practice. The key variable isn’t cognitive profile — it’s domain expertise asymmetry. Where that gap is largest, the agreement machine runs without a check. This post covers where the real risk concentrates, why structured review consistently outperforms ‘does anyone see any problems?’, and what a policy that actually changes behaviour looks like. Design the workflow. Not the person.

There’s a fundamental difference between cloud and on-prem work that I keep coming back to. Cloud is a sophisticated model kit with pre-designed pieces that snap together. On-prem was a pile of Lego bricks and a problem to solve. Everything in between was yours to figure out. If I had to go back tomorrow, I know exactly what skill would need the most work. It’s not the technical stuff you’d guess. It’s something more fundamental, something that years of managed services have slowly let atrophy.

Your brain evolved to detect lions. Now it may fire every time you open ChatGPT. This post unpacks three reasons LLMs are not neutral tools — what they’re trained on, how RLHF creates systematic pressure toward validation, and what your neurobiology does with the result. Then it gets specific: the same sycophantic system creates meaningfully different failure modes depending on who is using it. Nobody designed this. Nobody fully planned for it. And most deployment practices still aren’t accounting for it. The research is early. The mechanisms are not.

This week I’m heading to Prague for DataPoint, organized by my friend Štěpán Rešl, a man whose brain capacity I genuinely cannot account for. Quick trip: arrive Thursday, deliver my data literacy session Friday morning, fly straight home. No time to explore the city, which I’ve been promised is beautiful. I can confirm the food is extraordinary. I’ve been thinking about one particular meal since 2019. New post on what I’m delivering and why the topic still matters.

Data sovereignty concerns - driven by the CLOUD Act and NIS2 obligations - are pushing Swedish organizations to reconsider on-premises analytics. The problem: a decade of cloud adoption has quietly eroded the skills needed to execute on-prem projects. The Microsoft stack in 2026 is more capable than most assume, but lacks a Fabric equivalent. The real decision is operational ownership, not technology preference. Organizations that can reason across the full cloud-to-on-prem spectrum will navigate the uncertainty best.

The tech industry is cutting junior roles at record pace, calling it AI efficiency. But here’s the problem: you can’t skip a generation of practitioners and expect institutional knowledge to survive. The seniors who remain were once juniors who had space to build understanding from the ground up. That pipeline is being shut off. Part 2 is about what to do about it. How to mentor like you prompt. How to train for reasoning, not just execution - and why this might be the best time to hire juniors, not the worst.