“If you’ve built a solid semantic layer, AI becomes your unfair advantage.”
At Gravity, that belief is more than a guiding principle. It’s the foundation behind Orion, our autonomous, AI-powered data analyst. When it came time to choose the right platform to build on, the choice was clear: Looker.
Looker’s semantic modeling and API-first architecture make it more than a BI tool. It’s a launchpad for agentic analytics. Agentic analytics systems like Orion work best when they use detailed data definitions and have access to well-defined business context. With Looker, we got a powerful foundation for what’s coming next in the AI era.
I wanted to highlight the evolution from semantic modeling to autonomous insights and describe how Looker and Orion help businesses make faster decisions, deliver more personalized and contextual reports, spending dramatically less time on manual work.
A New Era: Why AI Needs a Semantic Layer
In today’s data ecosystem, there’s no shortage of tools, but there is a shortage of trust.
When companies integrate data into decision-making, many discover a common issue of inconsistent outputs. Without a shared understanding of the business, humans and AI struggle with conflicting or missing definitions.
That’s where the semantic layer comes in.
A semantic layer defines and standardizes business metrics across platforms and teams. It allows AI to work with trusted, aligned data, ensuring that “customer churn” or “net revenue” have the same definitions everywhere they appear.
This is a baseline requirement for humans and AI to collaborate within an analytics ecosystem. Without shared definitions, humans talk past each other, and products that allow you to talk with your data give inconsistent outputs. You need AI that can be trusted to work consistently with your data, and semantic modeling is what makes that possible.
By separating metric logic from reports and visualization, Looker enables organizations to speak a consistent language across teams and to intelligent agentic analytics systems like Orion.
Looker’s Vision: A Bet for This Moment
Looker’s mission since its founding has been simple but powerful: model your data once and use it everywhere. In the company’s earliest stages, the BI industry was focused on drag-and-drop reports and dashboards, and modeling felt technical, even niche.
But Looker focused on structure, prioritizing developer workflows, reusable logic, and an API-first approach. Today, as AI-driven analysis becomes mainstream, the architecture is proving to be incredibly forward-looking.
Looker’s semantic model doesn’t just support reporting. It defines a single source of truth that can be accessed programmatically, governed centrally, and extended across workflows.
Looker’s core bet on semantic model architecture is now enabling a major step forward in applying artificial intelligence to analytics.
Enter Gravity: Building Orion on Looker
When we built Orion at Gravity, our goal was to reimagine how analysis could be conducted in the AI era. We didn’t want to rebuild business intelligence basics like reports and dashboards. Instead, our AI uses these data assets on your behalf to decrease the time between insight, action, and outcome.
To make that happen, we needed a platform that could deliver:
-
Reliable, centralized business logic
-
Flexible programmatic access
-
Governance and security at scale
Looker delivered on all three.
Looker’s semantic layer gives Orion a complete understanding of metrics and definitions. Whether Orion is characterizing changes in sales velocity or analyzing churn by customer segment, it always works from the same trusted source of truth.
Looker’s API allows Orion to interact dynamically with the BI tool. This means Orion can proactively investigate data patterns, push updates to content, and deliver personalized insights where users already work.
And critically, Looker’s access controls ensure Orion only draws from permitted sources. This maintains trust without sacrificing autonomy.
With this foundation, Orion becomes more than a reactive assistant. It can be your always-on analyst partner that explores, reasons, and reports independently.
Real-World Impact: What Customers Are Seeing
When you combine Looker’s semantic layer with the years of analytical best practices that Gravity’s cofounders baked into Orion, the result is immediate and scalable. Here are a few of the ways customers are putting it to use:
1. Scalable, Personalized Reporting
Orion automates and distributes personalized and contextual client-specific reports directly from Looker models. This spans weekly, monthly, and quarterly cadences. No human analyst is required once the initial context is provided.
2. Autonomous Root Cause Analysis
When KPIs shift, Orion does more than report the change. It investigates. Powered by Looker’s unified definitions, it traces the cause and summarizes the “why” behind the “what”.
3. Embedded, Contextual Insights
Using API integrations, Orion surfaces insights directly within CRMs, customer portals, and custom applications. It can meet users where they already work.
Orion demonstrates the power of intelligent systems that don’t just respond, but anticipate and collaborate to make your data useful.
What This Means for the Future of Analytics
We’re entering a new phase of analytics. Why would you look at dashboards yourself when an AI who knows your role, your objectives, your action space and decision authority can do it on your behalf? Agentic analytics systems will surface decisions to be made – not just reports.
As AI tools become more autonomous, the need for shared semantic modeling becomes even more urgent. Looker is uniquely positioned to support this, as semantic modeling is no longer a supporting detail, but becomes the backbone of artificially-intelligent systems.
Developer-friendly, API-first platforms like Looker will sit at the heart of scalable, trusted analysis and insight generation, delivered by tools like Gravity’s Orion.
Build on the Foundation You Already Have
If you’re exploring AI and analytics, success it’s not just about choosing the right model, but about choosing the right foundation.
With Looker, many organizations already have the building blocks in place. And with Orion, they can activate that foundation to realize something transformative: an autonomous AI analyst that never sleeps, never forgets, and never guesses. You don’t need to start over. You just need to start.
To learn more about how Orion works with Looker in action, request a demo or reach out to our team to explore what’s possible at ByGravity.com or email us at Hello@ByGravity.com