For years, enterprises have discussed data democratisation as if it were an inevitable end goal. An assumption was made that turning on dashboards and training the business would lead to insight following naturally. But according to Barry McCardel, Co-Founder and CEO of Hex Technologies, the reality has been much more complicated.

In the recent episode of the Don’t Panic, It’s Just Data podcast, McCardel joined host Kevin Petrie, VP research and Head of Data Management at BARC, to talk about why access alone has never been enough. He also discussed how artificial intelligence (AI) is forcing the analytics community to rethink the purpose of data.

The conversation dives into a familiar issue: how can organisations empower non-technical users without compromising data trust or overwhelming the technical teams responsible for it?

“We’ve spent a decade pretending the problem was solved by self-service,” McCardel says. “But what we actually did was move complexity around instead of removing it.”

As AI becomes part of analytics platforms, that complexity is finally being addressed. This includes long-standing beliefs about roles, ownership, and teamwork.