logo

NJP

Dashboard Slop rant with Sonny Rivera

ServiceNow Podcasts · Oct 30, 2026 · podcast

In this special rant episode, Sonny Rivera joins Juan and Tim during a live recording and rant about AI-generated dashboards, semantic layers, and what it takes to trust an answer. The situation: dashboards slop is easy to build which makes foundation matter more, not less. We discussed: 

  • Building a dashboard was never the hard part. Being able to explain where a number came from is.
  • Speed without a governed foundation produces wrong answers faster. As Sonny put it, “fast and wrong is still wrong.”
  • Modeling data is really modeling the business. The job has not changed. How it gets done is changing.
  • A single source of truth did not hold up. Favors an interoperable set of semantic layers and context, with shared definitions where people actually care.
  • Logic written in the moment, in a dashboard or a pipeline, often never makes it back into the semantic layer. Closing that loop is the gap to fix.
  • Friction between teams is a sign that a definition matters. Make the differences visible rather than forbidding them.
  • Trust is what data leaders can least afford to lose, which is why testing belongs in dashboards too.
  • Writing code is no longer the slow part. Product management and testing are becoming the bottlenecks.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

View original source

https://omny.fm/shows/catalog-and-cocktails-the-honest-no-bs-data-podcast/dashboard-slop-rant-with-sonny-rivera