The Rise of Agentic AI in 2026 – 2026/01/15

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Is Agent Orange Agentic AI?

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Strap in, you beautiful, trusting little optimist. We’re about to crank the dial so far past irony that it transforms into existential despair. It comes with a side of eye-roll. Here’s your precious 2026 AI agent prophecy. It is now properly marinated in contempt. It is served with a garnish of pure, seething mockery.

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DATA WORLD: Big Data: The Art of Bullshit – 2026

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Bertxin Galestara and Sir Afilonius Rex,  based on an  opinion piece written by Marty Rhisiart Jones

Mountain View, 19th January 2017 – Bandoxa Thursday 15th January, 2026

“I’ve been accused of vulgarity. I say that’s bullshit.” – Mel Brooks

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Top AI Red Flags to Watch – 2026

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AI’s Red Flags – His Master’s Voice

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As we settle into 2026, artificial intelligence is no longer a futuristic promise. It is embedded infrastructure. It powers everything from enterprise workflows and personal assistants to autonomous agents that act on our behalf. Yet with greater capability comes greater exposure. The biggest red flags this year are not hypothetical doomsday scenarios. They are already materialising in boardrooms. They are visible in cybersecurity dashboards, consumer wallets, and regulatory filings. Here are the most pressing warning signs to watch in 2026. These are drawn from industry reports. They originate from expert predictions. Emerging incident patterns also highlight them.

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Navigating Data Warehousing’s Professional Crisis – 2026

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Martyn Rhisiart Jones

Read my absolutely fabulous books: http://www.goodstrat.com/books
 
A quiet disquiet has settled over the once-confident corridors of enterprise data. What was, not so long ago, regarded as a rigorous and rather specialised craft, data warehousing and business intelligence, now frequently presents itself in a more casual, even improvisational guise. A growing number of senior executives, technology directors and indeed practitioners themselves confess to a mounting discomfort with the quality, and at times the sheer quantity, of self-proclaimed experts who populate the field.
 

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The GigaOm Data Lake Report

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Nonsense on parade

This GigaOm report is a classic vendor-sponsored benchmark. Fivetran picked the competitors and shaped the test scope. GigaOm (as explicitly disclosed) executed it “as-is” with “compatible configurations subject to judgment.” It’s marketing material presented as independent research. It has several structural weaknesses. These weaknesses make the 77–95% cost savings claim highly misleading for most real organisations.

1. It only measures ingestion compute, not true TCO.

The report repeatedly calls itself a “TCO report,” but it explicitly excludes:

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DATA WORLD: Information Technology Mirror Balls! – 2026/01/12

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Coffee and cakes for breakfast
On the Way of Saint James

Imagine stepping onto a dimly lit stage, spotlight sharp, audience hushed. You lean into the mic and drop this line: “The key to success is sincerity.” Pause. Smile. “And if you can fake that… you’ve got it made.”

That’s George Burns, vaudeville legend, and cigar-chomping centenarian. He nails a truth that’s as old as show business. It is as fresh as today’s latest tech pitch deck.

Welcome to the strange, glittering world of information technology, where sincerity isn’t just optional—it’s optional and highly monetisable.

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Top 12 AI Grifters, Charlatans & Rogues to Avoid in 2026 – 2026/01/14

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Right, listen. If you’ve ever sat through one of those AI conferences, you know the ones. Some bloke in a black polo neck stands on stage. He’s clearly never met a mirror he didn’t like. He says, “We’re on the cusp of AGI.” It sounds as if he’s just invented gravity. Then you’ll know the particular flavour of despair I’m talking about.

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10 AI Agents Every Business Leader Needs To Steer Clear of in 2026 – 2026/01/13

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As we venture further into 2026, the landscape of enterprise artificial intelligence has undergone a subtle but profound shift. The once-dazzling promise of autonomous AI agents has matured into something more prosaic. These self-directed digital entities can orchestrate tasks from customer engagement to complex data integration. Yet, they are no less pervasive. They are no longer novelties confined to experimental labs; they inhabit boardrooms, back offices and supply chains alike.

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The Glorious Books of Martyn

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In an age awash with earnest manifestos, sanctimonious tech tomes, and the relentless hum of corporate orthodoxy, Martyn Jones arrives. He comes like a gleeful heretic at the cathedral door. He is armed with profanity and philosophical bite. He also has an irrepressible instinct for the absurd.

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Justifying Business Data Requirements – 2026/01/11

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Justify Your Data Needs

Should All Business Data Requirements Be Justified in Business Terms?

A Pseudo-Debate

Motion: All business data requirements must be justified in business terms. Potential business utility should be a deciding factor in whether they are fulfilled.

For the Motion: Sir Afilonius Rex
Against the Motion: Martyn Rhisiart Jones

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CONSIDER THIS: The Welsh Nine – 2026/01/09

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Nine… Three Times Three

Nine isn’t “lucky” in Welsh Celtic thought; it’s structural. It’s the number that describes how reality is layered, crossed, ripened, and completed.

Let’s unpack it.

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2026 Tech Trends: The Rise of Hyper-Hype – 2026/01/08

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On Your Head!

Here are the next 7 big bandwagon topics that IT charlatans, grifters, LinkedIn thought leaders, and poser consultants will jump on, talk endlessly about, and pretend they’ve been experts in since 2012 (roughly ordered by how soon & how hard they’ll hit the hype cycle in 2026–2028):

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A Brief History of Data Warehousing – 2026/01/07 – Includes Podcast

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Martyn Rhisiart Jones

Madrid, 7th January 2026

The origins of data warehousing are often pinned to the late 1980s, when the term “business data warehouse” first appeared in an influential IBM Systems Journal article by researchers Barry Devlin and Paul Murphy. I was based in Birmingham at that time, and I also wrote a similar foundational document on Information Centres for Sperry Univac.

Yet, as with many technological breakthroughs, the story is far richer and older than the conventional narrative suggests. The foundational components of what we now recognise as a data warehouse were quietly taking shape as early as the 1960s, driven by the need to organise, integrate, and analyse growing volumes of business information in an era of punch cards, magnetic tape, and the first mainframes.

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Weaving the Dragon’s Data: A Welsh-Inspired Tale for Enterprise Architects in the New Year – 2026/01/01

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Martyn Muses – 2026/01/01

Weaving the Dragon’s Data: A Welsh-Inspired Tale for Enterprise Architects in the New Year – 2026/01/01

The calendar turns to a fresh page in this crisp January of 2026. We, enterprise data and information architects, stand at a new threshold. Another year welcomes us, brimming with digital transformations. Data lakes swell like the River Taff after a storm. Information architectures evolve like the ancient mountain tops of Snowdonia. But amidst the algorithms and schemas, let’s pause for a moment of whimsy. What if we drew inspiration from the misty realms of Welsh myths and legends? Wales, that land of dragons and bards, offers a tapestry of stories. These stories mirror our quests: taming chaotic data into structured wisdom. They are about preserving cultural legacies in vast repositories. They ignite innovation from the sparks of history. In this Happy New Year ode, we’ll begin a narrative journey through Welsh lore. It is infused with the spirits of its iconic figures. Dylan Thomas, Dannie Abse, Richard Burton, Shirley Bassey, Paul Robeson, and Gwynfor Evans are part of this infusion. These spirits illuminate the art of data stewardship.

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Future Data Trends: Insights for 2026 Leadership

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Top 5 Trends Shaping the Future of Data, Analytics, and AI Leadership in 2026

I’ve had the privilege of leading a groundbreaking global study in partnership with a strategic client. During this study, I spoke with many key Chief Data Officers (CDOs). I also engaged with Chief Data & Analytics Officers (CDAOs) and AI executives across industries and geographies. The insights reveal how organisations are changing their data and AI strategies. They aim to drive real business value in an increasingly complex world.

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Understanding Data-Less Apps: The Future of IT

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Dublin 9th May 2017 –  revised 21st December 2025

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Is the Data Warehouse Dead? Exploring New Paradigms

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Segovia 20th December 2025

The Data Warehouse Is Dead. Long Live the Data Warehouse.

In 1992, Bill Inmon coined the term “data warehouse” and laid out four sacred rules: subject-oriented, integrated, non-volatile, time-variant. It was a blueprint for a fortress of truth, expensive, on-premises, batch-processed, and utterly indispensable. Fast-forward three decades. The fortress has been replaced by something that resembles a hyperscale cloud platform. This platform can run your AI models and your CEO’s dashboard simultaneously. Welcome to data warehousing in 2025.

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The Evolution of Data Warehousing: Principles for 2026

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Introduction

The data warehouse has undergone a profound transformation over the past decade. Expensive, rigid, on-premises systems were once built for batch reporting. These systems have now evolved into cloud-native, highly scalable platforms. They are designed to meet the demands of today’s data-driven organisations.

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The Truth About Data Lakehouses: Hype vs. Reality

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Hype and Misleading Claims Surrounding Data Lakehouses

A data lakehouse is marketed as a hybrid architecture. It combines the low-cost, flexible storage of data lakes. These lakes handle raw, unstructured data at scale. It also offers the structured querying, performance, and ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) transactional capabilities of data warehouses. Vendors like Databricks coined the term. Snowflake and others promote it as a platform for analytics. It serves AI and machine learning needs. This approach eliminates data silos and reduces redundant copies. It enables cost-effective scaling through open standards and decoupled storage and compute models. However, much of this is hype driven by vendor marketing. Vendors promote it as an evolution from “data swamps” (unmanaged data lakes) and rigid warehouses.

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Understanding Medallion Architecture: The Myth of Layers

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Somewhere, right now, as you read this, a data engineer is renaming a table. Again. They’re calling it Bronze, because that’s what the priests say it must be called. Bronze. Not “raw”, not “stuff we barely understand”, not “this arrived at 3AM and no one knows why”. Bronze. They do it solemnly, reverently, like a monk copying out the Book of Leviticus but with YAML. And when they are done, they will feel a sense of calm, because order has been restored to the universe. Temporarily.

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The Rise of Agentic AI: Silicon Valley’s Latest Obsession

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Oza-Cesuras 18th December 2025

The Rise of the Digital Minions: Why Agentic AI is the Tech World’s Latest Obsession

In the hushed corridors of Davos-style summits, one phrase has become inescapable. Agentic AI also dominates discussions in the feverish demo halls of San Francisco conferences.

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12 Influencers Tecnológicos Críticos en 2025/2026

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Aquí presentamos a 12 influencers tecnológicos frecuentemente criticados por difundir publicidad exagerada. Son conocidos por prometer plazos exagerados y por difundir narrativas poco realistas sobre IA, big data, computación cuántica y campos relacionados. Clasificados de forma general por notoriedad e impacto en la actual era de “reacción exagerada” de 2025.

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Unseen Data Messages: The Knitting Code of War

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When Yarn Learned to Speak

The soldiers never noticed her.

She sat where women had always sat. She was by the window and by the road. She was near the iron veins of the railway. Her hands were busy, her gaze soft. The love was in her eyes. The slow music of needles clicked and clacked like rain on Bethesda slate. In Wales, they would have called it cynefin, the comfort of the known. In Galicia, the way things have always been done. Magical, mysterious and mindful

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