Analytics and Data Science News for the Week of July 31; Updates from Databricks, Notre Dame, Power BI & More

Solutions Review Executive Editor Tim King curated this list of notable analytics and data science news for the week of July 31, 2026.

Keeping tabs on all the most relevant analytics and data science news can be a time-consuming task. As a result, our editorial team aims to provide a summary of the top headlines from the last week in this space. Solutions Review editors will curate vendor product news, mergers and acquisitions, venture capital funding, talent acquisition, and other noteworthy analytics and data science news items.

For early access to all the expert insights published on Solutions Review, join Insight Jam, a community dedicated to enabling the human conversation on AI.

Analytics and Data Science News for the Week of July 31, 2026

DataBahn Raises $40 Million Series B To Accelerate Innovation Across The Agentic Data Control Plane

DataBahn has raised $40 million in Series B funding led by Insight Partners to expand what it calls an “agentic data control plane” for enterprise telemetry. Its platform ingests, normalizes, and routes data from more than 600 sources, forwarding only what each destination actually needs and pulling extra context on demand, giving AI agents and security tools a governed, cost-efficient way to access the right signals as organizations move from isolated AI pilots to large-scale agentic systems.

Read on for more→ DataBahn raises $40 million Series B to accelerate innovation across the agentic data control plane

Helical Insight Makes Enterprise BI Free In Open Source

Helical Insight has made its enterprise-grade business intelligence capabilities available in its free, open-source Community Edition, shifting from a feature-gated model to one centered on paid support and services. The updated Community Edition now includes AI-powered conversational analytics with a bring-your-own-LLM approach, interactive dashboards, pixel-perfect reporting, embedded analytics, SSO, row-level security, multi-tenancy, white labeling, and report scheduling, giving organizations a feature-complete BI platform without the traditional restrictions found in many open-core offerings.

Read on for more→ Helical Insight makes enterprise BI free in open source

Notre Dame Launches Data, AI, And Computing Initiative To Unify Emerging Technology Research And Education

Notre Dame has launched the Data, AI, and Computing (DAC) Initiative, a multi-year, campus-wide effort to unify research, education, and academic services around data, AI, and computing. Directed by Nitesh Chawla, the initiative brings together existing strengths across colleges, schools, centers, and disciplines to advance foundational research, interdisciplinary collaboration, and real-world applications, with an explicit focus on using emerging technologies to address societal challenges and position the university as a trusted leader in responsible AI and computing.

Read on for more→ Notre Dame launches Data, AI, and Computing Initiative

Microsoft And Databricks Expand AI Partnership To Bring Business Context Into Enterprise AI

Microsoft and Databricks are expanding their AI partnership to help enterprises bring business context into AI systems more easily.2800 The collaboration focuses on integrating Databricks’ data and AI capabilities more tightly with Microsoft’s cloud and productivity platforms, giving organizations a clearer path to connect governed data, semantic context, and AI workflows across their Microsoft and Databricks environments.

Read on for more→ Microsoft Databricks expand AI partnership

Power BI July 2026 Feature Summary Adds New Authoring, Model, And Automation Capabilities

Microsoft’s Power BI July 2026 feature summary introduces a range of updates aimed at improving report authoring, semantic model management, developer automation, and mobile experiences. Highlights include modern visual defaults and color palettes, simplified title spacing, a new semantic model settings pane, TMDL view on the web, new REST APIs for organizational apps and paginated reports, generally available organizational app audiences, and conditional formatting for line charts and legends, all intended to make it easier to build, manage, and automate Power BI solutions at scale.

Read on for more→ Power BI July 2026 Feature Summary

Snowflake Advances The Trusted Agentic Enterprise Era With Unified Monitoring And Cost Management

Snowflake is advancing its vision of the “trusted agentic enterprise” with new capabilities for unified AI monitoring, governance, and cost management. The company has introduced a centralized AI gateway and control plane that gives organizations visibility into which agents access which data and models, along with tools for token monitoring, security guardrails against prompt injection and unauthorized access, and secure agent interoperability across enterprise ecosystems, aiming to make AI deployments more governable and cost-efficient as agent usage grows.

Read on for more→ Snowflake advances the trusted agentic enterprise era with unified monitoring and cost management

TDengine Makes Its Time-Series Platform Completely AI-Native To Support Modern Analytics And Agentic Use Cases

TDengine is evolving its time-series database into a fully AI-native platform, integrating features that make it easier to use time-series data in AI and analytics workflows.2800 The changes are designed to help organizations feed monitoring, forecasting, and agentic decision systems with real-time and historical metrics without building complex integration layers on top of the database.

Read on for more→ TDengine makes its platform completely AI-native

Terminal Raises $20 Million To Scale Telematics Integration Technology For Insurance, Fleet, And Logistics

Terminal has raised $20 million to scale its telematics integration technology for Fortune 500 companies across insurance, fleet management, and logistics.2800 The company’s platform connects vehicle and operational data into analytics and AI workflows, helping organizations improve risk assessment, operational efficiency, and decision-making in asset-intensive industries.

Read on for more→ Terminal raises $20 million to scale market-leading telematics integration technology

Expert Insights

Watch this space each week as our editors will share upcoming events, new thought leadership, and the best resources from Insight Jam, Solutions Review’s enterprise tech community where the human conversation around AI is happening. The goal? To help you gain a forward-thinking analysis and remain on-trend through expert advice, best practices, predictions, and vendor-neutral software evaluation tools.

Thought Leaders: Your AI Strategy isn’t Failing: Your Organization’s Gravity is Stronger Than Your Ambition by Samir Sharma

Every organization begins its AI journey with optimism. The strategy is approved, funding is released and of course a steering committee is established. There is genuine belief that AI will improve productivity, create new revenue opportunities and transform how the business operates.

Read on Solutions Review

Contributor Series: AI Doesn’t Cut Headcount but Cuts Time Between Idea & Output by Roman Stanek

When founding figures of modern AI, Geoffrey Hinton, warned that the technology’s ROI depends on how well it replaces human labor, he was voicing a common fear. Some organizations still look at automation just as a way to do more with fewer people. The story isn’t nearly as simple as the headlines suggest, and Big Tech has every incentive to let it stick.

Read on Solutions Review

Contributor Series: Don’t Build Exploratory Dashboards: Start Building Decision Dashboards by Pratham Yadav

If you lead operations, analytics, or research at an institution, you’ve sat through this meeting before: a beautifully built dashboard, fifteen tabs deep, gets unveiled to nods and applause — and three weeks later, the same managers are back in Excel, requesting a custom report, or calling an emergency meeting to figure out what to do about a problem the dashboard technically “showed” but never actually flagged.

Read on Solutions Review

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Mini Jam Q2, 2026: AI in Practice: How L&D Are Actually Changing Broadcasts June 25-26

AI is quickly moving from experimentation to operational reality across education, workforce development, and practitioner learning environments. What began as a conversation around tools has evolved into a much larger transformation involving skills, implementation strategies, institutional design, and the future structure of learning itself. All-in, Mini Jam Q2, 2026 provides an unparalleled opportunity to gain insights, engage with experts, and stay at the forefront of the conversation on the human impact of AI on education.

Read on Solutions Review

Solutions Review Announces New EdTech Site on the Future of Work and Learning

The site will provide ongoing editorial, expert thought leadership, research-driven analysis on the state of EdTech, and awards programming through Mesh Awards to cover fully this transformation. Solutions Review EdTech will also house information gain from quarterly virtual events, expert panels, podcasts, and more from its sister brand Insight Jam (1M+ on YouTube), the home for the human conversation.

Read on Solutions Review

We Didn’t Build Solutions Review for AI, We Built it for Buyers by Tim King

A nuclear bomb has been exploded in not only digital marketing, but enterprise tech buying. Buyers increasingly discover information through AI search and their favorite GenAI bot, social media platforms like LinkedIn, and synthesized answers rather than lists of blue links. Visibility still matters, but the question is evolving from “Can you rank?” to “Can you be anchored as trusted a source?”

Read on Solutions Review

Solutions Review Announces New EdTech Site on the Future of Work and Learning

The site will provide ongoing editorial, expert thought leadership, research-driven analysis on the state of EdTech, and awards programming through Mesh Awards to cover fully this transformation. Solutions Review EdTech will also house information gain from quarterly virtual events, expert panels, podcasts, and more from its sister brand Insight Jam (1M+ on YouTube), the home for the human conversation.

Read on Solutions Review

Mini Jam Q2, 2026: AI in Practice: How L&D Are Actually Changing Broadcasts June 25-26

AI is quickly moving from experimentation to operational reality across education, workforce development, and practitioner learning environments. What began as a conversation around tools has evolved into a much larger transformation involving skills, implementation strategies, institutional design, and the future structure of learning itself. All-in, Mini Jam Q2, 2026 provides an unparalleled opportunity to gain insights, engage with experts, and stay at the forefront of the conversation on the human impact of AI on education.

Read on Solutions Review

Insight Jam’s Mesh Lab Episode 5 Now Available: Human-Centered Environments

The conversation shifts beyond standard pedagogy to address the existential crisis facing students and workers as AI disrupts traditional ideas of productivity and purpose. Panelists emphasize the urgent need to stop measuring final outputs and instead focus on the creative, collaborative process of learning. Ultimately, the group argues that to foster uniquely human skills like adaptability in students, educators must first be granted the autonomy to exercise those exact same skills.

Watch on Insight Jam

Solutions Review Surpasses 250K on YouTube to Power Unmatched Media Momentum in Enterprise Tech & the Human Impact of AI

Solutions Review has officially surpassed 250,000 subscribers on YouTube, a milestone that’s about more than just the number. This moment marks the payoff of a deliberate, two-year strategy centered on authoritative video, human-led insight, and an early recognition of how AI search engines ingest information, assign trust, and surface sources at scale.

Read on Solutions Review

Solutions Review Editors Launch New ‘Human-AI Ledger’ Newsletter to Chronicle the Human Impact of AI

Artificial intelligence is everywhere—but understanding its human impact has never been more urgent. That’s where Solutions Review‘s latest newsletter, The Human-AI Ledger, comes in. Designed to chronicle how AI is reshaping the way we learn, work, lead, and live, this newsletter explores the soft side of AI—the non-technical, deeply human dimensions that determine whether this technological revolution helps us thrive or leaves us behind.

Sign up now to get a weekly debrief of the latest human-centric news, insights, and commentary coming out of this emerging discussion.

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How One Solutions Review Article Reshaped AI Answers Across an Entire Software Category

Something just happened in the AI search landscape that most companies will miss. But the ones who understand it will have a multi-year advantage. In January, Solutions Review recorded a 324 percent increase in media domain citations across AI answer engines in less than 30 days.

Read on Solutions Review

For consideration in future analytics and data science news roundups, send your announcements to the editor: tking@solutionsreview.com.