Ground Truth

Ground Truth EP 16: Before Anyone Asks

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 11:00:00 -0500

Our once-a-month episode where we talk about what Entrecore is building. Over the last five episodes, the judgment that should have governed a number kept getting lost: in one person's head, behind a vendor setting, in a dropped row, inside a spreadsheet cell, in a calculation nobody was watching. Maya and Theo take each of those problems in turn and explain how coreOS is built to handle it, with governance by design and zero trust as the starting assumption. Plus what a Big Four consulting firm said about why change inside a company does not stick. Brought to you by Entrecore.

Ground Truth EP 15: Nothing Wrong On The Report

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 10:00:00 -0500

For three weeks in 2022, Equifax sent lenders credit scores that were calculated wrong, from a legacy platform the company was already planning to retire. The credit reports themselves were never changed. Anyone who pulled their report that week would have found nothing wrong on it. Maya and Theo walk through the case end to end, and use it to separate two things the industry keeps treating as one: governing the definition, and governing the data a decision actually runs on. Brought to you by Entrecore.

Ground Truth EP 14: Inside The Limits

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 13:00:00 -0500

In 2012 a formula in a JPMorgan spreadsheet subtracted one rate from another and then divided by the sum of the two instead of the average. It roughly halved the reported risk, so a dangerous position looked like it was sitting inside its limits. The Chief Investment Office lost about 6.2 billion dollars. Maya and Theo use that to take apart the story playing out across business right now: data governance that is absent, misunderstood, and never actually implemented. Brought to you by Entrecore.

Ground Truth EP 13: It Never Throws An Error

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 09:00:00 -0500

In autumn 2020, 15,841 positive COVID tests vanished from England's contact tracing system because a spreadsheet hit its row limit and dropped everything past it without a warning. The dashboard looked complete. This show has spent twelve episodes on numbers that disagree. This week Maya and Theo take the question underneath that: why nobody catches it. Two failures that stayed invisible for days and for years, what finally exposed each one, and why nothing being built or funded right now would have caught either. Brought to you by Entrecore.

Ground Truth EP 12: They Can't Guarantee It

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 10:00:00 -0500

OpenAI wrote this about its own products: while unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage helped improve our models. On September 11 the four hosts of All-In spent a good part of an hour and a half on exactly that, on whether you can trace what an AI produced, and on what it costs a company when you cannot. Maya and Theo work through the setting most companies are relying on, the live provenance fight nobody can settle, and the legal exposure almost nobody has priced. Plus the week's two numbers: 78% and 6%. Brought to you by Entrecore.

Ground Truth EP 11: A Thousand Definitions For One Metric

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 10:00:00 -0500

The VP of Data at Shopify, running a 400-person team, went on a podcast this year and said semantic layer decisions have been her greatest failure as a leader, and that her company still has a thousand definitions for one core metric. Atlan's own co-founder says she feels terrible for anyone buying data technology right now. Maya and Theo put those confessions next to what the market is shipping as the cure, including 690,000 auto-written definitions rated 87% as good as a human, and ask what problem speed was ever going to solve. Brought to you by Entrecore.

Ground Truth EP 10: They Bought A Store. The Problem Was A Process.

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 16:00:00 -0500

The most expensive version of the bet this whole category made: about eight billion dollars for a catalog, to give an AI agent product a governed data foundation. That product reached roughly a billion in recurring revenue, and a partner survey then found not a single respondent naming it as a driver of recent bookings. This month's open-the-hood episode sorts every vendor from September into four piles, walks the five gaps that money does not close, and says plainly where Entrecore sits and where it does not. Brought to you by Entrecore.

Ground Truth EP 09: Six Kinds of Software, One Name

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 16:00:00 -0500

A vendor published a page this year admitting that searching for the name of its own product category returns six different kinds of software, and that the industry's converging vocabulary is confusing buyers. This week Maya and Theo trace three nouns that got crowded in a year, layer, engine, and trust, then set that against what the people running the stack actually said: one in four are shipping dashboards no living human is responsible for. Ends with a fifteen minute exercise on a document you already own. Brought to you by Entrecore.

Ground Truth EP 08: The Number Was Right. Nobody Used It.

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 17:00:00 -0500

An analytics practitioner wrote a line this week that reframes two years of dashboard complaints: nobody believed the numbers, so nobody acted on them, even when the numbers were right. This week Maya and Theo follow the trust thread from a data readiness index that says 15% of companies are ready for agentic AI, to a factory floor where the fix is a named person, to a consulting firm that names unclear ownership and then sells a redesign, to a catalog that renamed itself a context layer and quietly gave agent memories the same authority as verified lineage. Brought to you by Entrecore.

Ground Truth EP 07: All Five Numbers Were Correct

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 11:00:00 -0500

Five systems, five different numbers for the same campaign, and a consultant who ruled out the obvious answer: all five may be correct, and that is the problem. This week Maya and Theo follow a confession from the firms companies pay to build the fix, who say the failure modes are human and not architectural. Plus the audit seat putting a number on what a settled definition is worth, an advisory camp that says stop chasing it and schedule the argument instead, and one line that reframes all of it. Brought to you by Entrecore.

Ground Truth EP 06: Decisions Everywhere, Owners Nowhere

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:00:00 -0500

95% of data leaders say they cannot trace an AI agent's decision end to end. 72% admit they have approved critical agent decisions without reading the rationale. This week Maya and Theo follow the ownership thread through a finance survey where CFOs say they will trust AI "when they can audit it," an observability essay about teams that "monitor constantly and trust rarely," a writer who says companies have simply normalized their data chaos, and a line that stuck: the number gets chosen more than it gets produced. Brought to you by Entrecore.

Ground Truth EP 05: The Part We Usually Leave Out

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:00:00 -0500

Four episodes in, we have described the same hole from four different directions: everyone agrees AI has a context problem, nobody agrees where the fix should live, the business logic was never in a file, and a new tool does not change old behavior. Usually we stop there and hand you a question to ask on Monday. This week we do something different. We open up what Entrecore is actually building, and hold it against the exact gaps this show has spent a month documenting. Brought to you by Entrecore.

Ground Truth EP 04: New Tool, Same Behavior

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:00:00 -0500

A vendor sat in on 25 customer meetings in three days and wrote down what people actually said. One line stuck: "new tool, same behavior," from an insurance leader whose staff still type in the wrong number to dodge a broken workflow. This week Maya and Theo dig into that story, a pharma company where one word means four different, correct things to four departments, two writers who prescribe opposite fixes for the same disagreement, and a CFO who quietly gave up on the dashboard everyone agreed to. Brought to you by Entrecore.

Ground Truth EP 03: The Business Logic Was Never In The File. It Was In Someone's Head.

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 12:00:00 -0500

A piece published this week gave the industry's favorite illusion a name: automation theater, impressive dashboards while the real work still happens in spreadsheets and email, because the business logic that actually decides a number "exists only in someone's head." We hold that next to a data engineer's line, "alignment by agreement has no enforcement mechanism," a stat that says finance leaders burn five-plus hours a week just moving data by hand, and a VP of Marketing's real story of a decision that froze for months because nobody trusted the numbers anymore. Brought to you by Entrecore.

Ground Truth EP 02: The Market Started Arguing With Itself

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 09:00:00 -0500

This week the enterprise AI market published two opposite fixes for the same problem, twelve days apart, in the same outlet. One said buy a governed context layer. The other said fix the data engineering. Three vendors shipped context machinery while that argument ran. Meanwhile the disagreement is already documented in software you pay for: HubSpot publishes a page explaining why its numbers will never match Google Analytics, and Baremetrics lists eight reasons your MRR reads differently in Stripe. Same data, different answers, by design. Brought to you by Entrecore.

Ground Truth EP 01: Everybody Wants Context. Nobody Can Agree Where It Lives.

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 15:00:00 -0500

For two years the whole industry chased bigger models. This year the biggest names all landed on the same sentence: the models are fine, what is missing is context. Then they spent the year fighting over who owns the fix and renaming it every few months. Meanwhile the people actually running businesses are still losing the first ten minutes of every meeting to an argument over whose number is right. Episode 1 of Ground Truth walks through the year, the agent reality check, and the gap between how vendors talk and how operators actually hurt. In this episode: - How "AI has a context problem" went from contrarian take to industry consensus in one year - Why the fix kept getting renamed, and what an honest version of the fancy term actually is - The agent reality check: 88 to 95 percent of pilots stalled, and only 5 percent of enterprises trust the agents they already run - The language gap: "semantic layer" versus "three different answers to the same question" - Why the same pain shows up in hotels, plants, and factories that sell no software at all Brought to you by Entrecore.