Christophe Blefari, nao Labs — Interview with Alexy

Alexy Khrabrov talks with Christophe Blefari, co-founder of nao Labs, after his PyData Amsterdam 2026 keynote on the history of analytics from the warehouse to the lakehouse and today's agentic systems, including a live demo of talking to data in DuckDB. They discuss what a semantic layer should be, with unambiguous, human-readable definitions of metrics and dimensions rather than a pile of SQL queries; a two-layer approach where an agent falls back from the strict semantic layer to broader context; and nao, an open-source analytics agent that lets everyone in a company chat with its data while data people act as context engineers, with bring-your-own model and database.