Samuel Holcman: Thank you for tuning in to Real Talk. Be sure to join your host Sam Holtzman again for another edition of our program. We'll have more Real Topics of discussion then. How do you sort out the so-called jargon from real-world practices that work? Do the members of your organization find some business or technology advice utterly confusing? Welcome to Real Talk with Sam Holsman. In this program, we set the record straight and in terms that business people and technology people can understand. Now, here is your host, Sam Holsman. Welcome back to Real Talk. I'm Sam Holtzman. Today I want to do something a little bit unusual. I want to say thank you to Palantir. Yes, that Palantir. For finally saying aloud in very public terms what we at EACoE and BACoE have been saying, teaching and practicing for decades. A recent article titled Palantir's real secret sauce, love that phrase, ontologies, lays it out very clearly. It explains that for more than a decade, the data industry has obsessed over data quality, governance, lineage, catalogs, and ownership. All very, very, very important topics, but missed the central point. Clean, governed data is still inert. unless the system understands what that data actually represents in the real world. Not just rows and columns, but things in the world, things of interest to the business. People, accounts, vehicles, facilities, transactions, all requiring precise naming and precise definitions and how they relate. What is allowed, what is forbidden, and how these things change over time. In other words, schemas describe data, ontologies describe reality. Palantir openly says they did not start as a dashboards company or an analytics company, they started as a world modeling company. While everyone else was racing to dump more data into lakes and clusters, Palantir asked the question, EACoE and BACoE have been asking for over 50 years in enterprise architecture and business architecture. What are the real entities in this domain? How should they be represented? And of course, how do they relate? They built their core around an operational model of reality, entities, relationships, constraints, state transitions. And they made that ontology the system, not just the thin layer on top. So Palantir, sincerely thank you for saying it plainly and loudly. Meaning precedes intelligence. Now let's bridge to EA, Enterprise Architecture, BA, Business Architecture, and AI, Artificial Intelligence. Let us connect this to where you live, Enterprise Architecture, Business Architecture, and AI models. The article points out that early big data systems worked in quotes because they were retrospective, batch-oriented, and human in the loop. The meaning, the data meaning, lived in people's heads, not in the systems. That world is over. We are moving to angenic systems, systems that do not just analyze data but take actions. call tools, trigger workflows, allocate resources, and make decisions at machine speed. And the article, thank goodness, is blunt. When you try to build these angentic systems without an ontology, you get hallucinated actions, what we more accurately refer to as fabrications, misused tools, fuzzy safety boundaries, and coordination that collapses into what they brilliantly call prompt spaghetti. How about prompt manipulation? Palantir's answer is that their agents are constrained by the ontology. Actions are only valid if they correspond to legitimate state transitions on real entities. That's exactly the kind of disciplined ontology-driven thinking that REAL, Realistic Enabling Actionable and Logical EACoE Enterprise Architecture, and BA COE Business Architecture have required all along. Now with a little bit of humor. Let's talk about Father vs. Son Framing. So here's the question for you, the listener and reader. If Palantir is the son born in 2003, a millennial Gen Z successful, powerful, highly visible child of this ontology-centric worldview, do you want to learn from the child who's using these ideas? or from the father who has been formalizing, teaching and applying these ideas across industries for decades. Since EACoE and BACoO best practices are not published on the internet and is not AI accessible, let me repeat, not AI accessible, does the child know none, some or all of the real best practices? Of course, if you ask a millennial Gen Z person that question, you know what the answer is. The answer is, well, yes. Palantir is proving in the age of AI and data arena that ontology-driven designs is not academic. It's the moat. EACoE and BACoE are where you learn how to architect that moat for your entire enterprise and your business, not just inside one vendor's platform. If you are serious about AI models that do not hallucinate actions, about ungenetic systems that operate safely and coherently, about governance that is more than bureaucracy, you need the architectural discipline that comes from a true ontology-based EACoE Enterprise architecture and BACoE Business architecture practice. Let me suggest a call to action. So I leave you with this. Palantir has done the world a great favor by saying clearly, systems need a shared explicit model of reality and governance. Without ontology is just bureaucracy with physics. Let me repeat, systems need a shared explicit model of reality and Governance without ontology is just bureaucracy without physics. If that resonates with you and you want to move beyond catchy AI demonstrations and into sustainable ontology-driven enterprise and business design, then learn from the source. Learn from the father. Join us at EACoE and BACoE and learn in a structured, practitioner-focused way. how to actually define those ontologies, entities, relationship constraints, and state transitions for your organization, and then use that foundation to build trustworthy AI, robust EA, and practical BA. This learning is not about passing a multiple choice exam. It is about actually developing ontologies. So a question, do you want to hear it from the horse's mouth, the father, or from the child repeating some of what that father has been saying for years? The choice is yours. I thank you for listening or reading In Real Talk with Sam Holtzman. If you are ready, ready to build an ontology-driven foundation for your AI initiatives that are desperately needed, pathology driven foundation, please reach out to us at www.eace.org or www.bace.org for a no-fee discussion. It will be my pleasure to speak with you and let us get to work.