Forrester Research: The Missing Layer in Your AI Strategy
Why agentic AI stalls without governed business meaning
Your AI agents can access your data. But can they understand it?
Data access isn’t the bottleneck holding back enterprise AI. Shared business context is. When metrics, dimensions, business rules, and access policies aren’t standardized and governed, AI agents are forced to guess, and they guess wrong in ways that are hard to catch and costly to fix.
In its June 2026 report, Make Data AI Ready Via Semantic Layer Platforms, Forrester has defined the next-generation semantic layer as a control plane for data and analytics applications: a governed foundation that centralizes metric definitions, calculations, and access policies, and delivers them consistently to BI tools, data products, and AI agents.
By the numbers
70–80%natural language-to-SQL accuracy under controlled conditions according to benchmarks like Spider and PICARD. Accuracy degrades further on real enterprise queries. | 87%of Forrester surveyed enterprise cloud decision-makers use multiple cloud platforms and hyperscalers. | 38%of enterprise data still lives on-premises according to a Forrester survey of data and analytics decision makers. |
A consistent semantic foundation is what connects all three problems.
What’s inside the report:
- Why agentic AI stalls when enterprise data lacks a consistent, shared semantic foundation
- How Forrester defines the next-generation semantic layer as a control plane, not a BI accessory
- Why LLM-only natural language-to-SQL is not enough, and how grounding queries in a semantic layer achieves 100% accuracy
- How governed metrics, dimensions, calculations, and access policies reduce AI hallucinations and improve explainability
- Why semantic layers are evolving from single-stack BI tools into native enterprise data fabric services
- How to bridge hybrid, multicloud, and multi-tool complexity without a rip-and-replace modernization
- How Forrester maps the semantic layer vendor landscape across architectures and use cases
Built for data, analytics, and AI leaders who can’t afford to guess
Access the report, courtesy of Strategy.
Information in Forrester publications is based on Forrester's efforts to compile and analyze the best resources reasonably available to Forrester at any given time. Opinions reflect judgement at the time and are subject to change. This report is part of a broader collection of Forrester resources, including interactive models, frameworks, tools, data, and access to analyst guidance.