Joe Reis: Fighting “Context” and Other Tech-Industry Hype – Episode 47

Joe Reis

When Gartner declared 2026 "The Year of Context," Joe Reis leapt into action, immediately writing a good-natured satirical article about "context products," "context lakes," and the "analyst singularity."

It's a fun article that exemplifies Joe's no-nonsense approach to industry education and concludes with a serious point — "context does matter, and most organizations are terrible at it."

We talked about:

his forthcoming data modeling book, "Mixed Model Arts"

the origins his satirical post "Gartner declares 2026 the year of context"

our speculation on how the word "context" came to the fore

how his decades of experience help him fine-tune his hype detectors

"the one equals 10 dilemma" via which leaders extrapolate AI benefits that senior programmers gain onto less-skilled engineers

the challenges that executives miss of building a semantic layer

the endless quest for "silver bullets" over solving fundamental business problems

the relevance of Einstein's definition of stupidity in the AI hype cycle