Snowflake, the AI Data Cloud company, in collaboration with leading industry partners and ecosystem vendors including Salesforce, BlackRock, dbt Labs, and RelationalAI, announced a major initiative to lead the Open Semantic Interchange (OSI), a groundbreaking open-source effort. In today’s AI-driven landscape, fragmented data semantics across tools and platforms pose significant challenges for both human analysts and AI systems. The OSI initiative aims to address this issue by introducing a common, vendor-neutral semantic model specification, enabling standardized definition and sharing of semantic metadata and ensuring consistent business logic across AI and business intelligence (BI) applications.
“At Snowflake, we’ve long believed that interoperability and open standards are essential to unlocking the full potential of AI with your data,” said Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product, Snowflake. “With the Open Semantic Interchange initiative, we are proud to be leading the charge alongside our partners to solve a foundational challenge for AI the lack of a common semantic standard. This initiative reflects the industry coming together, not competing, to solve shared challenges and build a more connected, open ecosystem for all.”
Driving Interoperability and Trustworthy AI Insights
As AI transforms business operations, the demand for consistent semantics has become critical. Currently, differing interpretations of business metrics and metadata across tools create confusion, slow adoption, and undermine trust in AI-driven insights. OSI provides a unified, vendor-neutral specification for business, domain, and industry semantics, ensuring data is interoperable, reliable, and actionable across platforms. This empowers organizations to scale AI and BI with greater confidence, speed, and precision.
Key objectives of the initiative include:
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Enhancing interoperability across platforms: OSI enables AI, BI, and analytics tools to “speak the same language,” allowing businesses to adopt best-of-breed solutions without losing consistency in metrics or business logic.
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Accelerating AI and BI adoption: By standardizing how semantics are defined and exchanged, OSI ensures data is governed, consistent, and context-rich boosting the reliability of AI insights and speeding organizational adoption.
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Streamlining operations and reducing complexity: A common semantic specification minimizes duplicated work and reconciliations, allowing data and AI teams to focus on innovation rather than troubleshooting.
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Industry Leaders Unite for an Open, Interoperable Data Future
Fragmented data definitions remain a major barrier to AI adoption, making open standards crucial for semantic consistency. Rather than tackling this challenge individually, top industry and ecosystem leaders are co-leading OSI, including Alation, Atlan, BlackRock, Blue Yonder, Cube, dbt Labs, Elementum AI, Hex, Honeydew, Mistral AI, Omni, RelationalAI, Salesforce, Select Star, Sigma, Snowflake, and ThoughtSpot.
This collective effort represents a shift from closed, single-vendor approaches toward a collaborative, interoperable, and open-source ecosystem, laying the groundwork for trusted, scalable AI adoption and unlocking new opportunities for innovation.
Industry Voices on OSI:
“The future of AI depends on trust and trust starts with consistent, reliable data,” said Southard Jones, Chief Product Officer, Tableau. “By co-leading the Open Semantic Interchange with Snowflake and our partners, we’re building the foundation every AI agent and BI application needs: a common semantic framework that preserves meaning across platforms. This is the Rosetta Stone for business data, ensuring our customers can harness trusted insights with confidence, no matter where their data lives.”
“Our focus at dbt Labs has always been to empower data teams to work more efficiently,” said Ryan Segar, Chief Product Officer, dbt Labs. “We see the Open Semantic Interchange as a natural extension of this, as it aims to solve the foundational problem of siloed and incompatible data semantics. By creating a universal language for data definitions, this open source initiative will help data practitioners ensure consistency and reliability, which is essential for scaling AI initiatives.”
“At BlackRock, we’re constantly seeking ways to enhance data interoperability and drive innovation for our clients,” said Diwakar Goel, Global Head of Aladdin Data, BlackRock. “The Aladdin platform unifies the investment management process through a common data language across public and private markets, helping clients unlock value and scale. We are excited to be part of the Open Semantic Interchange to help establish a common, vendor-neutral specification that will not only streamline data exchange but also accelerate the adoption of AI and business intelligence applications across the financial industry.”