The Gilbane Advisor

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Gilbane Advisor 11-5-25 — Semantic cartography, AI workflows

November 5, 2025 /

This week we feature articles from Nicolas Figay, and Adham Khaled.

Additional reading comes from Gaurav Anand, Cobus Greyling, UX Movement, and Mat Honan.

News comes from Adobe, Bloomreach & Uniform, MariaDB, and Graphwise.

Our next issue arrives November 19th.

All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index

Opinion / Analysis

Semantic Graphs: Going beyond the semantic conflation of “metadata” and “graph” labels

“Semantic and graph technologies are gaining traction. Unfortunately, this rise often comes with an overload of buzzwords — and even semantic conflations across terms… This article explores that phenomenon, starting with metadata and drawing an analogy with graph. It highlights the need for clarity and rigor, while pointing out the communication challenge of presenting innovation amidst the buzzword soup.”

As you read Nicolas Figay’s piece, imagine all the confusion, misunderstandings, and wildly diverse expectations possible among your project team. (7 min)

https://medium.com/@nfigay/semantic-graphs-going-beyond-the-semantic-conflation-of-metadata-and-graph-labels-c2c0b5d3b5b6

Perplexity at Work Guide review

Adham Khaled: “I spent 40 hours testing Perplexity’s secret 42-page Work Guide… This playbook promises to replace ChatGPT, Google, and your VA. I tested every workflow — and found brutal truths about what actually saves money (and what’s pure marketing hype).”

The Work Guide describes Perplexity’s internal workflow, and is now freely available. The Work Guide and Khaled’s review are relevant and useful whether you use Perplexity or not, since most enterprise AI workflows are experimental. (9 min)

https://pub.aimind.so/i-spent-40-hours-testing-perplexitys-secret-42-page-work-guide-5c5bcdab8558

More Reading

All Gilbane Advisor issues

Content technology news

Adobe delivers new AI assistants and models across Creative Cloud

AI features across Creative Cloud apps including Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere, and Illustrator focused on efficiency, precision & control.
https://news.adobe.com/news/2025/10/adobe-max-2025-creative-cloud

Bloomreach and Uniform unveil turnkey conversational commerce framework

Aggregates product catalogs from multiple commerce platforms, and enriches them with AI-driven tagging, normalization & metadata optimization. 
https://www.bloomreach.com/en/news/2025/bloomreach-and-uniform-to-unveil-new-turnkey-conversational-commerce-framework/ ■ https://www.uniform.dev ■ https://machalliance.org

MariaDB unveils unified cloud database platform

MariaDB Enterprise Platform 2026 unites transactional and analytical workloads with native vector search, built-in RAG and intelligent agents.
https://mariadb.com/newsroom/press-releases/mariadb-unveils-unified-cloud-database-platform-designed-to-accelerate-agentic-ai-application-development

Graphwise launches Graph AI Suite

With its built-in AI Flywheel, it turns enterprise knowledge into a self-improving engine for trustable AI by leveraging GraphRAG.
https://graphwise.ai

All content technology news

The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, data, web, and digital experience technology and information professionals. We publish recommended articles and content technology news most Wednesdays. We do not sell or share personal data.

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Adobe delivers new AI assistants and models across Creative Cloud

October 28, 2025 /

Adobe announced new AI features across Creative Cloud apps including Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere, and Illustrator. The updates focus on improving efficiency, precision, and control for creative professionals.

Highlights include the AI Assistant in Photoshop, which can handle repetitive tasks, provide personalized recommendations, and support conversational editing while allowing seamless switching to manual tools. Photoshop also gains Generative Fill with partner models, Generative Upscale using Topaz Labs and other partners, and Harmonize for blending objects naturally into scenes. Premiere introduces AI Object Mask, shape-based masking tools, and Fast Vector Mask in public beta for faster video editing. Lightroom receives an AI Assisted Culling feature to help manage large photo collections.

Firefly enhancements include Image Model 5 in public beta for 4MP photorealistic generation and editing, Prompt to Edit for natural language adjustments, and planned Layered Image Editing. Firefly Boards adds Rotate Object for 2D-to-3D perspectives, PDF export, and batch image downloads. Firefly Creative Production supports no-code batch editing of thousands of images. Firefly Custom Models let users create personalized models for stylistically consistent outputs.

Many features are in public or private beta, with partner models from Google, Black Forest Labs, Topaz, and others integrated directly into Adobe apps, available to Creative Cloud Pro and Firefly plan subscribers.

https://news.adobe.com/news/2025/10/adobe-max-2025-creative-cloud

MariaDB unveils unified cloud database platform

October 22, 2025 /

MariaDB plc announced the availability of MariaDB Enterprise Platform 2026, a database platform for building next-generation intelligent applications. This new release reduces complexity by unifying transactional, analytical and AI (vector) database engines into a single platform. With the addition of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and AI agents, MariaDB Enterprise Platform is designed to create a strategic advantage for enterprises building agentic applications. Instead of complex, slow data pipelines, AI agents can now autonomously access data and extract critical insights from MariaDB’s cloud-native, serverless platform instantly.

  • Built-in RAG: MariaDB Enterprise Platform 2026 introduces a native “RAG-in-a-Box” solution. MariaDB AI RAG enables the grounding of large language models (LLMs) with context from the data stored in MariaDB.
  • Embedded AI Copilots: MariaDB’s AI copilots are ready-to-use agents inside MariaDB’s platform allowing agentic applications to interact with data through natural language. Available via MariaDB Cloud, preconfigured agents include a developer and a DBA AI copilot. The developer copilot is a Text-to-SQL agent connected to MariaDB’s database that responds to natural language queries with insights on the data stored in your database.
  • Integrated MCP Servers: The Model Context Protocol (MCP) Servers enable AI Agents to interact with MariaDB databases and other databases across the enterprise.

https://mariadb.com/newsroom/press-releases/mariadb-unveils-unified-cloud-database-platform-designed-to-accelerate-agentic-ai-application-development

Bloomreach and Uniform unveil turnkey conversational commerce framework

October 22, 2025 /

Bloomreach, an agentic platform for personalization, and Uniform, a composable digital experience platform, today announced a turnkey AI solution unveiled at the MACH Alliance’s AI Hackathon taking place from October 21-22. Powered by the Open Data Model from MACH Alliance, the solution showcased how composable technology and generative AI can be seamlessly combined, enabling any brand to build conversational experiences that help them retain control of their customer relationships.

Built on AWS, the solution aggregates product catalogs from multiple commerce platforms through Uniform, and enriches them with AI-driven tagging, normalization, and metadata optimization. Then, the product data flows into Bloomreach Clarity, where it powers a fully conversational shopping interface — allowing customers to browse, compare, and shop via natural dialogue. 

https://www.bloomreach.com/en/news/2025/bloomreach-and-uniform-to-unveil-new-turnkey-conversational-commerce-framework/ ■ https://www.uniform.dev ■ https://machalliance.org

Graphwise launches Graph AI Suite

October 16, 2025 /

Graphwise, announced Graph AI Suite, a comprehensive Graph AI platform that accelerates how businesses unlock value from their data. It turns enterprise knowledge into a self-improving engine for trustable AI by leveraging GraphRAG. The platform’s capabilities simplify how organizations build intelligent knowledge graphs that continuously learn at scale.

  • Modeling & Mapping: Allows organizations to build a graph from structured and unstructured data, including automated taxonomy building. It helps them mature from “text on a document” toward “structured content” and, eventually, a knowledge graph, improving GraphRAG performance.
  • Ingestion & Automation: These components connect to arbitrary systems and support specific use cases for each organization, enabling integration with LLMs such as Gemini, Llama, and others and agentic AI platforms.
  • Semantic Analysis: Automatically moves content toward a knowledge graph by creating taxonomies and enterprise vocabularies. It drives semantic metadata enrichment across data silos, building the basis for a highly accurate GraphRAG infrastructure. A key part of the AI Flywheel, it makes the platform easy for subject matter experts to use.
  • GraphRAG: This is the Graph AI Suite’s core capability for delivering trustworthy AI. It uses the knowledge graph to furnish the LLM accurate, context-rich and semantically relevant data, mitigating hallucinations and ensuring responses are grounded in verifiable facts.

http://www.graphwise.ai/

Gilbane Advisor 10-15-25 — AI UI & intent, AI app spending

October 15, 2025 /

This week we feature articles from Sharang Sharma, and Justine & Olivia Moore, Marc Andrusko & Seema Amble.

Additional reading comes from Dharmesh Shah, Heiko Hotz, Bob DuCharme, and Sainath Palla.

News comes from TileDB, Grafana Labs, commercetools, and Google.

All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index

Opinion / Analysis

How can AI UI capture intent?

Exploring contextual prompt patterns that capture user intent as it is typed

“AI interfaces become truly intelligent when they anticipate rather than react. Instead of waiting for users to articulate perfect prompts, contextual UI patterns can surface intent naturally whether through adaptive presets for file uploads, dynamic refinement chips for search, or inline tone controls for content creation. Users spend less time explaining what they want and more time refining the results that matter.”

Sharang Sharma shares some appealing examples of what such UI’s could look like. (5 min)

https://uxdesign.cc/how-can-ai-ui-capture-intent-d7a6d0393ded

The AI Application Spending Report

Where startup dollars really go

Enterprise AI application spending is growing rapidly and is where future growth and open-ended opportunity is headed as AI infrastructure capex and foundation model development begin to plateau.

a16z’s Justine & Olivia Moore, Marc Andrusko, and Seema Amble found some patterns early enterprise AI applications, and identified 50 AI-native application layer companies already in the market. (9 min)

https://a16zenterprise.substack.com/p/the-ai-application-spending-report

More Reading

All Gilbane Advisor issues

Content technology news

Google announces Gemini Enterprise

The new front door for Google AI in your workplace, Gemini Enterprise is an AI-powered conversational platform designed to bring Google AI to every employee for every workflow.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/introducing-gemini-enterprise

commercetools previews Cora

The AI-native shopping companion for conversational commerce shows how enterprises will be able to deliver human-like continuity across every channel.
https://commercetools.com/press-releases/commercetools-previews-cora

TileDB launches Carrara, an omnimodal data intelligence platform

Carrara can discover, access, and analyze all data types, from structured tables to non-tabular data such as genomics, imaging, documents, models, and agents.
https://www.tiledb.com/blog/introducing-carrara

Grafana Labs releases Grafana Assistant

New AI-powered capabilities accelerate root cause analysis, reduce alert fatigue, and make observability accessible to users at all skill levels.
https://grafana.com/about/press/2025/10/08/grafana-labs-revolutionizes-ai-powered-observability-with-ga-of-grafana-assistant-and-introduces-assistant-investigations/

All content technology news

The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, data, web, and digital experience technology and information professionals. We publish recommended articles and content technology news most Wednesdays. We do not sell or share personal data.

Subscribe | View online | Editorial policy | Privacy policy | Contact

Google announces Gemini Enterprise

October 9, 2025 /

From the Google Products Blog…

AI has opened up new opportunities in the cloud market — and today, we announced our next chapter with Gemini Enterprise. Gemini Enterprise is designed on the premise that true business transformation in the era of AI must go beyond simple chatbots. You need a comprehensive and integrated platform that brings all your company’s data, tools, and people together in one secure place.

That’s exactly what we’ve built. Gemini Enterprise is an AI-powered conversational platform designed to bring the full power of Google AI to every employee for every workflow.

Built with Google’s most advanced Gemini models, it enables you to chat with your company’s documents, data, and applications. It also gives you the tools to build and deploy AI agents, as well as a suite of pre-built agents, and is grounded in your company’s information and your personal context at work.

Delivering this level of transformation requires a commitment to upskilling your teams. So today, we are announcing a comprehensive set of programs to help you succeed, including free Google Skills training, and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Ready (GEAR) program.

Gemini Enterprise: The new front door for Google AI in your workplace

commercetools Previews Cora

October 8, 2025 /

commercetools, an AI-first commerce platform for enterprises, announced a preview of commercetools Cora, an AI-native and multimodal shopping companion designed to demonstrate the future of conversational commerce. Cora shows how enterprises will be able to deliver human-like continuity across web, mobile, WhatsApp, and other channels. Shoppers can begin a journey on one device and continue it on another without losing context or progress. Cora maintains continuity and gives enterprises a branded companion they fully control.

Cora gives enterprises the practical tools to build loyalty and reduce drop-off by keeping every shopping journey connected. Key capabilities in the first phase of its launch include:

  • AI-First Product Discovery: Conversational search that understands vague requests (i.e., long queries) and translates them into relevant recommendations.
  • Omnichannel Continuity: Preserves context, cart state, and conversation history across all channels and devices.
  • Brand-Controlled Experience: Keeps shoppers inside a retailer’s ecosystem, ensuring that every interaction reflects the brand’s identity and builds lasting trust.

Cora is also fully white-labeled, allowing retailers to customize and brand the experience while relying on commercetools’ enterprise-grade security, governance, and data controls.

Cora will debut with AI-powered product search and launch in phases toward full agentic capabilities, including autonomous checkout.

https://commercetools.com/press-releases/commercetools-previews-cora

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