Your data is worthless to AI (Without a semantic layer)

Gartner just declared the semantic layer a non-negotiable foundation for AI. Most of the industry responded with a blank stare.

This presentation is the answer to that blank stare.

Your AI has a dirty secret: there is no mechanism in its architecture for truth. Only probability. Every response is a hallucination — most just happen to overlap with the facts. The philosophers figured out why 2,500 years ago, and they also gave us the solution. Plato defined knowledge as justified true belief. RAG is our architecture for justification. But there's a problem — your structured data is wholly inaccessible to it, because your JSON is full of magic strings that mean nothing outside the system that generated them.

This presentation shows you how to fix that. Not with a new framework, a bigger model, or an enterprise triple store. With a discipline — the discipline of making meaning explicit. JSON-LD, RDFS, OWL, and Schema.org form a standards stack that has been quietly solving this problem for 30 years. Your AI is already fluent in it. Half the web already speaks it. Google built an empire on it.

You'll leave with a concrete understanding of what the semantic layer actually is, why it matters, and — most importantly — how to start building it this week with the APIs you already have.

Your data isn't worthless. AI just doesn't know what it means yet.

About Michael Carducci

Michael Carducci spent years learning to see things as they actually are; first as a magician, then as a software architect, now as both simultaneously. And somehow that’s not even the whole story.

He’s the author of Mastering Software Architecture (Apress, 2025) and is currently writing The Semantic Layer. He has spent over 25 years following interesting problems; through roles from individual contributor to CTO and back again, across industries and continents.

As a speaker, he applies the same toolkit he uses in close-up magic: attention, misdirection, timing, storytelling, and the instinct to take the long way around when that’s where the truth lives. Audiences at hundreds of conferences across four continents have described his talks as the kind that change how you think about a problem rather than just what you know about it.

He also makes YouTube videos about technology and curiosity with his wife Kate, because some ideas are too important (or too interesting!) to leave only in conference rooms.

More About Michael »