00:00 Intro00:49 From consulting to building a product05:00 Finding the right co-founder07:07 What data teams should delegate to AI11:21 Context engineering and the future of dashboards18:36 Avoiding the agent cemetery23:59 Do you need a semantic layer first?29:47 Inside Nao’s open-source analytics agent38:22 How data professionals create visible value44:48 What’s next for Nao?AI agents promise to let anyone analyse company data through a conversation—but reliable agentic analytics requires far more than connecting an LLM to a database.In this episode of The Data Hustle, we speak with Claire Gouze and Christophe Blefari, co-founders of Nao, about building an open-source framework for agentic analytics. They explain how their experience in consulting and data leadership exposed a recurring problem: business teams want answers faster, while data teams remain trapped as overloaded bottlenecks.We discuss which parts of data work should be automated, why analytics engineers may evolve into context engineers, whether traditional dashboards are becoming obsolete, and why companies risk replacing their dashboard graveyards with agent cemeteries.Claire and Christophe also break down the role of semantic layers, metadata and reusable context; why teams should not wait for perfect foundations before experimenting; how Nao structures its analytics agent; and how data professionals can use AI to become more visible and valuable rather than automate themselves out of the process.

Find Nao at:- https://getnao.io- https://github.com/getnao/nao- https://www.linkedin.com/in/claire-gouze/- https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopheblefari/