Podcast & Field Notes

Where should intelligence
live in your stack?

For every dollar companies spend on AI, they should spend six on the data architecture underneath it. Almost none of them do. This is not a technology problem — it's an allocation problem.

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Framework

The Intelligence Allocation Stack

Every company that fails with AI builds from the top down. Every company that succeeds builds from the bottom up. The order is not negotiable.

LAYER 01

Data Foundation

Clean ingestion, consistent storage, and governed pipelines. The test: can three people run the same query and get the same answer?

LAYER 02

Semantic Layer

Business logic translated into machine-readable form. One definition of revenue, one definition of an active customer — everywhere.

LAYER 03

Orchestration Layer

The nervous system that connects, transforms, and routes data to where it needs to go. The difference between data you have and data you use.

LAYER 04

AI Layer

Models, agents, and interfaces that depend entirely on the three layers beneath them. The most visible layer. The least foundational.

Latest Episodes

Allocating Intelligence Podcast

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Episode

The Data Consulting Agentic Shift: Tony Zeljkovic on What Survives

Tony Zeljkovic — five years of data consulting across life science, biotech, and finance — joins to work through what survives the agentic shift: which parts of data consulting expertise hold value when AI agents handle the implementation layer.

May 7, 2026 · 8 min

Episode

Welcome to Allocating Intelligence

The Allocating Intelligence podcast is about getting AI right by building from the data foundation up. Field notes, practitioner conversations, and the Intelligence Allocation Stack framework.

Mar 29, 2026 · 4 min

Recent Articles

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Podcast

The Data Consulting Agentic Shift: Tony Zeljkovic on What Survives

Tony Zeljkovic — five years of data consulting across life science, biotech, and finance — joins to work through what survives the agentic shift: which parts of data consulting expertise hold value when AI agents handle the implementation layer.

May 7, 2026
Semantic Layer

Omni's $120M Series C Is Not a BI Story. It Is a Semantic Layer Story.

Omni just closed a $120M Series C at a $1.5B valuation. The headline is the number. The signal is what sits at the center of their thesis: the semantic layer. Here is what that means for how you are building your data stack right now.

Apr 23, 2026
Semantic Layer

MCP and the Semantic Layer: How AI Agents Finally Get Governed Business Context

Model Context Protocol connects AI agents to governed semantic layers — making enterprise AI trustworthy, traceable, and vendor-agnostic. Here is how the architecture works and where it breaks down.

Apr 21, 2026
Semantic Layer

Semantic Layer ROI: The Business Case for Building It

Skipping the semantic layer isn't free. The costs are real, compounding, and measurable — and they get worse the moment you add AI on top.

Apr 10, 2026
“The next wave of AI consulting won't sell models. It will sell the infrastructure that makes models trustworthy.”
Wesley Nitikromo

Wesley Nitikromo

Founder, Unwind Data