Expert Opinion
By
Mel Sheppard
//
10 July 2026
Some conference themes are chosen. This year's chose itself.
AI was in every keynote, every session, every panel discussion at Ibis this year. Nobody planned it that way, but it was impossible to miss, and the consensus in the room was clear: this is becoming a real part of everybody's job.
We all know the two camps by now. The sceptics and the fanboys, still holding their ground.
But the thing that struck me most wasn't the debate. It was how much had changed in twelve months. Last year AI was a side conversation, something people talked about optimistically in the margins, all promise and possibility. This year it sat at the heart of nearly every discussion. And crucially, people didn't show up with hopes about what AI might one day do. They showed up with real, tangible examples of what it was already doing.
That shift, from optimism to evidence, is the story of this year's Ibis.
Monday's keynote featured our own AI solutions. We showed AI Query Builder, our privacy-first way of querying data with natural language, and gave the first preview of Tufty, our AI assistant that builds your projects and apps alongside you. Both were really well received, which meant a great deal to the team.
On Tuesday, Santi Becerra took the stage to share his thoughts on the future of business intelligence and the impact AI is likely to have on it. It was the kind of session that leaves you thinking for days afterwards.
I sat in on a number of customer case studies, where customers presented their real-world use of AI and the impact it has had across their organisations. Listening to them, one thing became hard to argue with. You can no longer ignore AI, or the productivity and cost savings it is already generating for the businesses willing to embrace it.
For me personally, though, the highlight wasn't on a slide. It was the people, and the conversations I had with open-minded individuals about the future of their roles and the opportunity AI presents. Those are the discussions that stay with you.
For the team, we were incredibly proud to be debuting Tufty, our new AI agent designed to help you build applications more quickly. Watching attendees get hands-on with it, and gathering their feedback in real time, was easily one of the most exciting parts of the week.
There was an unexpected side effect of all that testing, too. We got to watch people ask the agent to do things we had never anticipated anyone would ask. And for the most part, Tufty stepped up and passed with flying colours. You can read more about how it held up in Rich Harvey's blog introducing Tufty.
Each year at Ibis, the Infosol team run a Squirrel365 hackathon, where participants, often completely new to Squirrel365, are given a project to complete over the course of a few sessions. The results are presented on the main stage on the final morning, and it never ceases to amaze me what people manage to build in such a short space of time.
This year's challenge was on the theme of water security. Participants were encouraged to visualise the problem and include what-if analysis, modelling the impact of different changes on projected water consumption and availability. You can read more about the challenge and the solutions on the Squirrel365 Community.
The BO community is something special. Their passion for the platform, and for the semantic layer especially, runs deep, and there's a genuine belief that it's the best way to deliver operational reporting for a business. An event like this brings that energy into one room, and pushes the community to find better ways to work with the platform, rather than simply waiting for vendors to fill the gaps.
On the final day we held our InfoBurst Squirrel Influence Council session, where customers and users get to see what's on the roadmap and have a real say in it. It's one of my favourite parts of the week, because the direction of the product genuinely comes from the room.
This year the requests clustered around two themes. The first was better sharing and collaboration of content, with team and organisation plans and shared workspaces high on the wish list. The second was a set of enhancements to AI Query Builder, including making it work beautifully on mobile so users can ask questions of their data on the go.
What I keep coming back to is what I saw whenever someone sat down with Tufty. The ease of it. The versatility of Squirrel365 underneath it. And the bubble of excitement around what this all makes possible, especially with writeback in the picture.
The time it takes to build, maintain and modify a project is about to shrink dramatically. I'm genuinely excited to see where the conversation around AI goes from here. I think it'll be unrecognisable twelve months from now.
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