Analytics and Data Science News for the Week of May 15; Updates from Anthropic, Databricks, Dataiku & More

Solutions Review Executive Editor Tim King curated this list of notable analytics and data science news for the week of May 15, 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 May 15, 2026

Anthropic Brings “Claude For Small Business” To Where SMBs Already Work

Anthropic has launched Claude for Small Business, a packaged offering that embeds Claude into popular tools like QuickBooks, HubSpot, Canva, DocuSign, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365 so small teams can automate finance, ops, sales, marketing, HR, and customer service workflows without building from scratch. The bundle includes prebuilt “Claude Cowork” workflows plus monthly Agent SDK credits for paying customers, so even very small businesses can start orchestrating agents across their existing SaaS stack and gradually move from ad hoc chat to repeatable automations.

Read on for more→ Claude for Small Business

Dataiku’s “Expert-to-Agent” Lets Domain Pros Turn Their Know-How Into Governed AI Agents

Dataiku has introduced Expert-to-Agent (E2A), a new capability that lets business experts turn their domain knowledge into production AI agents on Dataiku’s governed platform. E2A provides a visual, inspectable interface for designing, grounding, and orchestrating agents across company data, documents, and systems, shifting AI from a “productivity layer” to an operational decision backbone where agents make real decisions on real data with clear accountability and traceability.

Read on for more→ Dataiku Expert-to-Agent

Economist Impact: Leading Firms Make AI Deliver By Redesigning How Work Gets Done, Not Just Buying Tools

Economist Impact’s “Making AI Deliver” benchmark, based on 1,200 executives and 27 in‑depth interviews, finds that AI leaders succeed by treating AI as an operating model change—clarifying ownership, redesigning workflows, and investing in data and governance—rather than as isolated pilots. The report emphasizes that durable impact comes when organizations align AI initiatives with strategy, metrics, and risk appetite, and continuously iterate on deployment based on feedback from the people actually using and affected by AI.

Read on for more→ Economist Impact: Making AI Deliver

Gartner: If You Skip Semantics, Your AI Agents Get Dumber And More Expensive

A new Gartner brief warns that enterprises deploying AI agents without a semantic layer—business concepts, relationships, and meaning—are seeing inaccurate outputs and wasted AI spending. Gartner argues that grounding agents in semantic models and knowledge graphs tied to trusted data sources is now a prerequisite for reliable autonomous behavior, because agents operating only on raw tables and unstructured text are far more likely to hallucinate, mis-route actions, and drive up token and infrastructure costs.

Read on for more→ Gartner says lack of semantics causes inaccurate AI agents and wasted spending

Golden Analytics Comes Out Of Stealth With $7M To Build AI‑Native BI That Writes Its Own Dashboards

Golden Analytics has emerged from stealth with $7 million in seed funding from NEA and Madrona to build an AI‑native business intelligence platform designed around how people actually work with data. Its core AI system can automatically interpret datasets, surface key insights in seconds, suggest and generate visualizations and dashboards, and turn raw data into presentation‑ready outputs, allowing users to interact via natural language, direct manipulation, or full automation rather than traditional report building.

Read on for more→ Golden Analytics debuts with $7M seed funding

Rocket Software Buys Vertica To Bolt High-Performance Analytics And AI Onto Mission-Critical Cores

Rocket Software has completed its acquisition of Vertica from OpenText, folding the enterprise-grade analytics database into its modernization portfolio. The deal brings more than 600 customers and 170 employees to Rocket and is meant to let enterprises run advanced analytics and GenAI directly on trusted core systems—across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid deployments—so they can modernize mainframes and other critical platforms without offloading data to separate analytics stacks.

Read on for more→ Rocket Software completes acquisition of Vertica

Vena Adds Excel-Native Financial Consolidation And A Unified Agentic Suite For Orchestrated Planning

At Excelerate Finance Fest 2026, Vena announced an AI-enabled Financial Consolidation product that brings audit‑ready consolidation and close into its Microsoft‑native platform. The company also highlighted the GA of Vena Planning Agent, Vena MCP Server, and a unified data layer with Acterys, positioning Vena as an “Orchestrated Planning, Decisioning and Close” platform where people, data, processes, and agents work together across planning, decisioning, and financial close.

Read on for more→ Vena announces financial consolidation and AI-amplified innovations

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.

Insight Jam and Donald Farmer Launch Waitlist for New Mesh Expert Group on the Last Mile: Analytics Leadership in the Age of AI

Over twelve monthly sessions, a cohort of just eight senior analytics and BI leaders works through the practical and strategic dimensions of leading in an AI-augmented environment.

The sessions build progressively: early months establish a framework for where human judgment remains indispensable; middle months address the operational pressures, data quality, governance, the proliferation of shadow AI tools, and conversational interfaces that complicate deployment in real organizations; later months turn toward team development, role evolution, and a planning horizon of two years.

Join the waitlist on Insight Jam

The Editors Lens: The Universal Semantic Layer is Becoming the Control Pane for Enterprise AI by Tim King

Enterprise AI adoption is accelerating quickly, but it’s clear organizations continue to struggle with what some leaders now describe as the “AI trust gap.” As AI become more deeply embedded into operational workflows, enterprises are discovering that access to data alone is not enough to ensure reliable outcomes, especially as AI requires consistent interpretation, governed access, and trusted context across increasingly distributed environments.

Read on Solutions Review

Information Gain Series: Why Data is Like Fire: The AI Accountability Crisis No One Talks About

During a recent episode of Insight Jam, Solutions Review President Doug Atkinson sat down with Sujay Dutta to discuss one of the least understood realities of the AI era: most organizations are attempting to scale artificial intelligence on top of data foundations that were never designed for real-time AI execution.

Read on Solutions Review

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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.