AI agents

Alex covers AI agents that work with data: agentic analytics, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and what an agent needs before it can query a lakehouse and return a correct answer.

Below are his articles, videos and podcast episodes on those topics, newest first, pulled from his feeds.

Articles

Alex Merced's Blog

Turning an Analytics Question Into a Verified Agentic Graph

A complete AGS 1.0 graph for governed metric questions, with verification gates, deterministic check scripts, and reconciliation against a semantic la...

Alex Merced on Medium

AI Weekly: Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Sol and Luna, and MCPA

Week of September 16 to 23, 2026 Continue reading on Medium »...

Alex Merced's Blog

How Apache Ossie Is Deciding What Agents and BI Tools Can Ask a Semantic Layer

How Apache Ossie's layered query design gives AI agents both a constrained dimensional interface and a grain-safe SQL interface for semantic layers....

Alex Merced on Medium

AI Weekly: DeepSeek Cuts Prices as Agents Go Hosted

Open Data Lakehouses for Everyone

AI Weekly: DeepSeek Cuts Prices as Agents Go Hosted

Week of September 10 to 17, 2026...

Alex Merced on Medium

AI Weekly: Four Frontier Models in Seven Days

Alex Merced's Blog

Agentic Data Architecture

A six-layer reference architecture for agents on company data: planners, tool boundaries, identity, the semantic layer, and what breaks when a layer i...

Alex Merced's Blog

Context Engineering for Data Agents

Why text-to-SQL accuracy collapses on enterprise schemas, the five kinds of context an agent needs, where each one hides, and how to make the semantic...

Alex Merced's Blog

Guardrails for AI on Company Data

The control surfaces that actually contain damage once an agent is fooled: identity, permissions, audit trails, and prompt injection at the query laye...

Alex Merced's Blog

The Data Team of the Agentic Era: Generalists Owning End-to-End Workflows

The case for generalists owning end-to-end data workflows with agents, the counterargument, and how to make the transition work....

Open Data Lakehouses for Everyone

Open Standards for Agentic Harnesses

Every team that gets serious about AI agents hits the same wall, usually around month three....

Open Data Lakehouses for Everyone

AI Weekly: Qwen4 Preview, Hot Chips, and Agent Tools Go GA

Week of August 19 to 26, 2026...

Open Data Lakehouses for Everyone

Your Agent Should Answer the Phone: A Field Guide to AI Gateways on Slack, Discord, Telegram, Signal, and Teams

The most useful thing my terminal agent ever did happened while I was nowhere near a terminal....

Open Data Lakehouses for Everyone

Graphs in AI Engineering Have Solved Three Problems. The Fourth Is the Plan.

Ask an agent to ship a feature and watch what it does....

Alex Merced's Blog

Agent-Driven Storage Tiering for Apache Iceberg: Moving Cold Data Without Breaking Queries

A background agent can move cold Iceberg partitions to cheaper tiers without breaking live queries. Heatmaps, path-safe moves, and restore paths....

Alex Merced's Blog

Securing the Agentic Lakehouse Gateway: Preventing Prompt Injection and Data Exfiltration

Agentic lakehouse gateways face prompt injection and exfiltration through query results. A threat model and defenses for the layer in front of data....

Alex Merced's Blog

Metric Contracts in Code: Testing, Versioning, and Serving Business Logic to Multi-Agent Systems

Metric contracts in code let teams test, version, and serve business logic to multi-agent systems without each agent inventing its own SQL....

Alex Merced's Blog

Query Routing at Machine Scale: Dynamic Workload Distribution Across Lakehouse Engines

Route each lakehouse query by shape, not by sender. Signals, rules, and how to keep dashboards, batch jobs, and agents from sharing one engine....

Open Data Lakehouses for Everyone

The Agent Is Now a Named Coworker, and It Needs a File Format

Open your terminal and count the agent CLIs installed on it....

Alex Merced's Blog

The Agent Is Now a Named Coworker, and It Needs a File Format

Named, persistent agents need a file format. Open Agent Profile, Buzz, Grok Bot, and Hermes Bot Mode show why a portable agent identity matters....

Alex Merced's Blog

Your Agent Should Answer the Phone: A Field Guide to AI Gateways on Slack, Discord, Telegram, Signal, and Teams

A field guide to AI gateways on Slack, Discord, Telegram, Signal, and Teams: architecture, auth, cost, and the failure modes that matter....

Alex Merced's Blog

Graphs in AI Engineering Have Solved Three Problems. The Fourth Is the Plan.

Knowledge graphs, GraphRAG, and LangGraph solved three problems. The fourth is the work itself: a reviewable graph of bounded agentic loops....

Alex Merced's Blog

The Five Layers of an Agentic Lakehouse

The five layers of an agentic lakehouse: Storage, Catalog, Semantic, Gateway, and Agent Surface, and how one question travels through all of them....

Alex Merced's Blog

Goal-Directed Data Quality Agents: Anomaly Quarantine on Apache Iceberg

Goal-directed data quality agents that watch Apache Iceberg tables, detect anomalies, and quarantine suspect data safely with snapshot isolation and b...

Alex Merced's Blog

Managing the TCO of Agentic Analytics: Token Budgets, Query Throttles, and the Economics of Autonomy

Managing the total cost of agentic analytics: token budgets, query throttles, unit economics, and the FinOps discipline that keeps AI spend under cont...

Alex Merced's Blog

Metric Contracts in 2026: Standardizing Business Logic Across Multi-Agent Frameworks

Metric contracts in 2026: versioned, testable definitions of business logic that let multi-agent frameworks compute revenue identically, with OSI inte...

Alex Merced's Blog

Query Routing at Machine Scale: Multi-Engine Workload Distribution for the Agentic Lakehouse

Query routing at machine scale for the agentic lakehouse: engine selection, acceleration substitution, admission control, and placement....

Alex Merced's Blog

Securing the Agentic Lakehouse Gateway: A Threat Model for Prompt Injection, Exfiltration, and the Firewall That Reads Sentences

A threat model for the agentic lakehouse gateway covering prompt injection, exfiltration, and the firewall that reads sentences....

Alex Merced's Blog

Semantic Layer Federation: One Meaning for Data That Lives Everywhere

Build a federated semantic layer across multi-cloud data so one set of governed metric definitions serves BI tools, dashboards, and AI agents identica...

Alex Merced's Blog

Building Stateless AI Tool Gateways with FastMCP, the 2026 MCP Spec, and Kubernetes

How to build stateless AI tool gateways with FastMCP, the 2026 MCP specification, and Kubernetes, and why statelessness finally makes MCP scale....

Alex Merced's Blog

The Plan and the Worker: Two Open Specifications for Agent Harnesses

Two open specifications, the Agentic Graph Specification and the Open Agent Profile, turn agent plans and agent identity into portable, reviewable fil...

Alex Merced's Blog

Budgeting for Agentic Analytics When Every Question Costs Something Different

Budgeting for agentic analytics when every question costs something different: token economics, query economics, instrumentation, and the cost control...

Alex Merced's Blog

The Five Layers of an Agentic Lakehouse and Where the MCP Server Sits

The five layers of an agentic lakehouse and where the MCP server sits: storage, catalog, semantic layer, MCP gateway, and agent surface, plus identity...

Alex Merced's Blog

Wiring Analytical Queries to Transactional APIs in Closed-Loop Decision Agents

Wiring analytical queries to transactional APIs in closed-loop decision agents: conditional writes, sagas with compensations, decision records, and bl...

Alex Merced's Blog

Surviving Optimistic Commit Collisions When Hundreds of Agents Write to Iceberg

Surviving optimistic commit collisions when hundreds of agents write to Iceberg: which conflicts are real, commit buffers, partitioning, and the patte...

Alex Merced's Blog

Why Agentic AI Needs a Governed Semantic Layer Behind the Model Context Protocol

Why agentic AI needs a governed semantic layer behind the Model Context Protocol: metric consistency, access control, Apache Ossie for portable....

Alex Merced's Blog

Moving From Supply Chain Dashboards to Decision Loops With the Model Context Protocol

Moving from supply chain dashboards to decision loops with MCP: sense, decide, act, and verify, with typed action tools, idempotency keys, and graduat...

Alex Merced's Blog

Metric Contracts as the Interface AI Agents Actually Need

Metric contracts as the interface AI agents need: calculation, inclusion rules, grain, temporal semantics, ownership, semantic versioning, and testing...

Alex Merced's Blog

Guardrails for Analytics Agents That Do More Than Answer Questions

The risk isn't agents going rogue, it's agents acting correctly on bad input at machine speed....

Alex Merced's Blog

Building Agent Telemetry Tables in Iceberg That Survive an Audit

A practical guide to building agent decision traces in Apache Iceberg that support audit reconstruction, governance review, and cost attribution....

Alex Merced's Blog

What Agentic Analytics Actually Costs, and How to Keep It Bounded

Agent analytics generates two cost streams that scale on different variables. Here's the arithmetic, the levers that actually move the number, and how...

Alex Merced's Blog

When the Query Optimizer Starts Managing Its Own Materializations

Autonomous materialized view management replaces quarterly review meetings with workload-driven scoring, and it's essential when AI agents generate....

Alex Merced's Blog

Why AI Agents Fail on Raw Data, and What to Give Them Instead

Agents fail on raw lake data because business rules live in people's heads. Data products with semantic contracts fix this at the source....

Alex Merced's Blog

The Five Layers Between Your Lakehouse and a Trustworthy Agent

Agent reliability is a property of the stack the model sits on. Five layers with distinct owners and failure modes turn the agent is unreliable....

Alex Merced's Blog

Surviving Commit Conflicts When Dozens of Writers Hit the Same Iceberg Table

Commit conflicts multiply with writer count, and AI agents introduce unpredictable write patterns....

Alex Merced's Blog

Wiring an AI Agent to Apache Polaris with the Model Context Protocol

The catalog is the right attachment point for AI agents working against a lakehouse. Here's how to wire the official Polaris MCP Server and add the re...

Alex Merced's Blog

Governing What Agents Cost You

Agents break the four assumptions analytics platforms were built on. A practical guide to identity, budgets, semantic layers, caching, and instrumenta...

Alex Merced's Blog

Three Vendors Are Rebuilding the Path From Transaction to Agent

Databricks, Snowflake, and SAP are closing the gap between operational databases and analytical platforms through acquisition, betting on different la...

Podcast episodes

Alex Merced Tech Podcast
Alex Merced Tech Podcast

AI Models & Agentic Harnesses, Graph Engineering, Gaming on Android Devices, Dispatch

Episode Details
Alex Merced Tech Podcast
Alex Merced Tech Podcast

Understanding AI Agent Skills, MCP and Custom GPTs/Gems

Episode Details
DevRel & Developer Advocacy
DevRel & Developer Advocacy

Understanding AI Agent Skills, MCP and Custom GPTs/Gems

Episode Details
Alex Merced Tech Podcast
Alex Merced Tech Podcast

Embracing AI Disruption and AI Tooling

Episode Details
DevRel & Developer Advocacy
DevRel & Developer Advocacy

Embracing AI Disruption and AI Tooling

Episode Details
Alex Merced Tech Podcast
Alex Merced Tech Podcast

2025 Reflections, Google Antigravity, NotebookLM, Dremio AI Agent, Pangolin Catalog, Dremioframe & Iceframe Python Libraries for Apache Iceberg

Episode Details
DevRel & Developer Advocacy
DevRel & Developer Advocacy

2025 Reflections, Google Antigravity, NotebookLM, Dremio AI Agent, Pangolin Catalog, Dremioframe & Iceframe Python Libraries for Apache Iceberg

Episode Details
Alex Merced Tech Podcast
Alex Merced Tech Podcast

Understanding the role of MCP, Langchain and Agent2Agent

Episode Details
Alex Merced Tech Podcast
Alex Merced Tech Podcast

Enabling and Optimizing Agentic AI: Access, Performance and the Semantic Layer

Episode Details

Books