Enabling Self-service Data for AI: Insights from Promethium CEO Prat Moghe

This exclusive Q&A with Prat Moghe, CEO of Promethium, explores enabling self-service data for AI at scale.

Self-service analytics has promised to democratize data access across the enterprise — but for many organizations, the reality has been a frustrating cycle of unmet expectations and broken workflows. Despite investments in modern BI platforms, semantic layers, and data catalogs, business users still find themselves waiting days or weeks for answers, while data teams drown in ad hoc requests.

According to Prat Moghe, CEO of Promethium, the issue isn’t the technology stack — it’s the design of the workflow itself. “Most self-service implementations assume business users will adapt to how data systems work, rather than making those systems adapt to how decisions actually get made,” Moghe explains. In real-world scenarios, by the time usable data arrives, the decision has already been made based on instinct, not insight.

In this exclusive Q&A, Moghe lays out a new approach to solving this self-service bottleneck — one built on intelligent orchestration and agentic workflows. He explains how Promethium’s Mantra™ Data Answer Agent delivers governed, contextual insights in minutes, not weeks, and how its architecture works with existing data infrastructure to accelerate results without risky overhauls.

The interview, curated by Solutions Review Executive Editor Tim King, dives into the shortcomings of today’s data stacks, the need for explainable AI in analytics, and why the future of data lies in rethinking how questions become answers.

To hear more from Moghe, check out his appearance on the Insight Jam Podcast, where he expands on AI’s role in data trust, scaling governance, and the future of analyst-augmented decision-making.

Enabling Self-service Data for AI

Question 1: Data leaders are drowning in ad hoc requests despite billions invested in self-service tools. What’s actually broken?

Answer: The fundamental issue isn’t technology, it’s workflow design. Most self-service implementations assume business users will adapt to how data systems work, rather than making those systems adapt to how decisions actually get made.

Here’s what typically happens: A business leader needs to understand customer churn patterns for a product launch next week. They check the existing dashboards — nothing relevant. They submit a request to the data team. Three days later, they get a dataset with cryptic column names like “CUST_STAT_FLG” and no documentation about calculation logic. Several follow-up rounds later, they get the usable insights needed, but the launch decision has already been made based on intuition.

This pattern repeats constantly across organizations. According to recent surveys, over half of data professionals say it takes more than a week to fulfill a typical ad hoc request, and most require multiple iterations to deliver actionable insights. The bottleneck isn’t computing power or storage — it’s the gap between how people ask questions and how systems provide answers.

This is because traditional self-service gives users access to pre-curated dashboards and predefined datasets. What they actually need when exploring new questions is the ability to get complete, contextual answers without waiting for new curation. That requires rethinking the entire workflow from question to decision.

Question 2: Companies have semantic layers, data catalogs, and modern BI platforms. Why isn’t that solving the problem?

Answer: Those tools solve important pieces of the puzzle, but they’re not designed to work together seamlessly when someone asks a new question.

For instance, take this real-world example: “Which of our enterprise customers are most likely to churn in Q4, and what’s driving that risk?” To answer this properly, you need customer data from Salesforce, usage patterns from your product analytics, support ticket volumes from your service database, and contract details from your ERP system. The challenge isn’t just accessing these sources; it’s that the business definitions and metadata needed to combine them properly are fragmented across BI tools, data catalogs, semantic models, and tribal knowledge that exists only in someone’s head.

Current tools excel at predefined scenarios but break down during exploration. A semantic layer can tell you that “customer_tier” means enterprise vs. SMB, but it can’t automatically incorporate the context that enterprise churn calculations should exclude customers in their first 90 days or those currently in contract negotiations.

The missing piece is intelligent orchestration — systems that can interpret intent, reason about what data is relevant across multiple sources, apply the right business logic automatically, and package results so they’re immediately actionable. Most organizations have the raw materials for self-service but lack the intelligence layer to make it work in practice.

Question 3: How does Promethium’s approach differ from traditional self-service platforms?

Answer: Traditional self-service platforms expect business users to navigate dashboards or predefined datasets. But when the question doesn’t fit the mold — which is often — it gets kicked back to the data team, who must stitch together sources, build new pipelines, and deliver the answer manually.

Promethium flips that workflow. Instead of building from scratch, data analysts can now deliver Instant Data Answers that are governed, complete, and explainable in minutes, not weeks.

Here’s how it works:

1. A business stakeholder asks a new question.
2. The analyst poses that question to Promethium.
3. Our agentic architecture — orchestrated by Mantra™, the Data Answer Agent interprets intent, identifies relevant sources, applies governance and business logic, and generates a full answer: data, SQL, definitions, and lineage.
4. The analyst reviews, validates, and shares the result — wherever the business needs it: in BI tools like Tableau or Power BI, as a published dataset in Snowflake or Databricks, or via our data marketplace or workflow systems.

The key difference? Promethium empowers analysts to operate at the speed of the business without waiting for engineering or provisioning. It augments the data team’s role rather than bypassing it, putting them in control of trusted, scalable self-service.

Question 4: Trust and governance are major concerns with AI-generated analysis. How do you ensure accuracy and compliance?

Answer: Trust in AI-generated insights requires three things: explainability, validation, and continuous improvement. We address each systematically by combining business definitions, technical metadata, lineage, and usage history into a unified understanding layer we call our 360° Context Engine.

Every data answer includes complete transparency, including the SQL queries generated, the business rules applied, the sources accessed, and the assumptions made. Data teams can review, modify, and approve logic before it’s used for similar future questions, building organizational knowledge over time.

For validation, we maintain human oversight throughout the process. Data teams don’t just review final outputs; they actively shape how the system learns. When an analyst refines a query or corrects business logic, that feedback is incorporated into the platform’s memory, making future answers more accurate and aligned with organizational standards.

The result is AI that augments human expertise rather than replacing it. Speed increases dramatically, but control and accountability remain with the data team, making every data answer traceable and explainable.

Question 5: Most organizations have complex, distributed data architectures. How can they implement this without major infrastructure changes?

Answer: Our architecture is built on open principles — we connect to data where it lives rather than requiring migration, consolidation or replication. The platform creates a virtual layer that can query across Snowflake, Databricks, cloud warehouses, and SaaS applications simultaneously, applying governance and business logic consistently regardless of where data resides.

Implementation typically follows a crawl-walk-run approach. Organizations start by connecting their primary data warehouse and defining business logic for their most common question types. As the system learns organizational patterns and builds trust, it expands to additional sources and use cases.

The key advantage is immediate value without infrastructure risk. Organizations typically see significant reductions in data team request volume within weeks of initial deployment, using existing security policies and governance frameworks. Teams then expand to additional sources and use cases as the system builds organizational trust and understanding.

We’ve also designed the platform to enhance rather than replace existing tools. Results can be consumed directly through our interface, embedded in Tableau or Power BI, or delivered through existing workflow systems. This preserves investments while dramatically improving capability.

Question 6: Looking ahead, how do you see the relationship between data teams and business users evolving?

Answer: The most successful data teams are moving from service providers to strategic enablers. Instead of spending time translating requests and building one-off analyses, they’re focusing on defining business logic, establishing governance frameworks, and ensuring organizational data literacy.

We’re seeing early adopters implement agent-to-agent workflows where business applications can directly request Data Answers from Promethium’s Mantra without human intervention. This doesn’t eliminate the need for human judgment in defining the underlying logic, but it multiplies the impact of each data professional by automating routine interactions.

Within 2-3 years, we expect routine analysis to be largely automated, with data teams focused on complex investigations, strategic planning, and ensuring AI systems align with business objectives. The most valuable skill will be translating business strategy into data strategy, rather than translating business questions into technical queries.

The end goal isn’t replacing human expertise — it’s amplifying it so that every business decision can be data-informed without overwhelming the people who understand data best. Promethium is built for that re-imagined future — it’s an agentic platform that enables true self-service data at scale. By transforming how questions become answers, we help data teams do more with less and help every decision-maker move faster with confidence.