This article provides Chief Data and Analytics officers with a strategic guide for navigating the crowded semantic layer landscape, demonstrating why a robust definition system is a critical infrastructure dependency for both GenAI and agentic systems across six distinct vendor categories.
A semantic layer translates between the actual semantics of business workflows and data they produce and the LLM "understanding" gained through its training. This translation quality directly determines RAG retrieval accuracy, more so for text2SQL applications.