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 on Medium

AI Weekly: Fable 5.2, Muse Ember, and TPU 8i Max

Alex Merced's Blog

Agent Gateway Control Matrix: What A2A and MCP Gateways Enforce Before an Agent Touches Lakehouse Data

SAP Agent Gateway, agentgateway 1.7.0 and Databricks MCP servers compared on six controls, with checks you can run against any endpoint....

Alex Merced on Medium

AI Weekly: Gemini 4 Carbon, Open Mistral, AMD’s Surge

Open Data Lakehouses for Everyone

AI Weekly: GPT-6.1 Terra, Agent Skills and Anthropic's S-1

Week of October 21-28, 2026...

Alex Merced on Medium

AI Weekly: GPT-6.1 Terra, Agent Skills and Anthropic’s S-1

Alex Merced's Blog

MCP in Regulated Environments: What the Toronto MCP Dev Summit Agenda Says About Production Agents

Registries, gateways, delegated identity, and audit: MCP Dev Summit Toronto 2026 patterns for production agents over lakehouse data....

Alex Merced on Medium

AI Weekly: Open Weights Surge and a Breaking Claude API

Alex Merced's Blog

Your Data Agents Are CPU-Bound, and the Hardware Market Just Noticed

Analytics agents spend most of their time on CPU-bound tool calls, not the model. Size three planes separately and measure your ratio from traces....

Alex Merced on Medium

Haiku 5.5, Muse Wonder, Open Racks: Oct 6–14

Alex Merced's Blog

Schema Pruning and Few-Shot SQL Selection for Data Agents Facing Thousands of Columns

How data agents prune enterprise schemas down to the columns that matter, ground filter values, and pick few-shot SQL examples with the right shape....

Alex Merced's Blog

How to Build a Golden-Question Benchmark for Your Data Agents

Build a golden-question benchmark for data agents: frozen Iceberg tags, execution-based scoring with Arrow, and CI gates....

Alex Merced's Blog

When a Data Agent Gives a Wrong Number: Incident Response for Agentic Analytics

A plan for when a data agent gives a wrong number: severity levels, containment, Iceberg time travel reproduction, and blast radius queries....

Alex Merced's Blog

Multi-Tenant Data Agents: Serving Many Customers From One Lakehouse

Serve many customers from one lakehouse without leaking between them: isolation models, Polaris grants, and tenant-scoped agent state....

Alex Merced's Blog

Release Management for Data Agents: Shipping Prompts, Tools, Models, and Metrics Without Breaking Answers

Ship prompts, tools, models, and metric changes without breaking answers: agent manifests, shadow mode, canaries, and rollback....

Alex Merced's Blog

Semantic Caching for Data Agents Without Serving Stale or Leaked Numbers

Cache data agent results safely with canonical query keys, Iceberg snapshot freshness checks, and permission-aware cache keys....

Alex Merced's Blog

Small Language Models for Data Agents: Where They Win and Where They Fail

Where small language models win inside a data agent and where they fail, plus a routing architecture that escalates only when needed....

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'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....

Open Data Lakehouses for Everyone

AI Weekly: DeepSeek Cuts Prices as Agents Go Hosted

Week of September 10 to 17, 2026...

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....

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....

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....

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