Episode Details

Why are companies investing heavily in AI, analytics, and data platforms while business leaders still struggle to see what is happening across their operations quickly enough to make confident decisions?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Massimo Merlo, Vice President for UK, Iberia, and Italy at Elastic, about why the next stage of enterprise AI adoption will depend less on who deploys the most advanced models and more on which companies can give people and AI systems access to relevant, trusted, and secure information when decisions need to be made.

Massimo describes the problem as a lack of decision-grade visibility. Most large companies are not short of data. They have spent decades building data platforms, analytics systems, dashboards, cloud infrastructure, and reporting tools. Yet information remains fragmented across departments and applications, insights arrive too late, and employees often struggle to find the small amount of information that matters among enormous volumes of data.

The result is a growing gap between having information and being able to act on it.

Massimo explains why simply adding an AI model to this environment does not solve the underlying problem. If an AI system is connected to fragmented, outdated, poorly governed, or irrelevant information, it can produce convincing answers without providing reliable business outcomes. The quality of an AI model matters, but the context available to that model increasingly determines whether AI becomes a useful business asset or an operational liability.

This leads to one of the biggest technology conversations emerging around enterprise AI: context engineering.

Massimo explains how context engineering provides AI systems with the relevant data, tools, permissions, organizational knowledge, and guardrails required to complete a task safely. Rather than sending ever-larger volumes of information to AI models, companies need infrastructure capable of retrieving the right information and making it available at the moment a person or software agent needs to act.

Fraud detection provides a practical example. An AI agent evaluating a transaction needs more than access to a powerful model. It requires customer history, behavioral patterns, company risk thresholds, permissions, compliance requirements, and the ability to recognize activity that falls outside normal behavior. Without that context, the system could block legitimate customers or approve fraudulent transactions while presenting its decision with complete confidence.

We also discuss why digitally mature companies can still struggle with real-time decision-making. Massimo shares lessons from Elastic's work with organizations including Reed, the Met Office, and Rightmove, explaining why having sophisticated technology systems does not automatically make a company context mature. Information can still remain trapped between applications, teams, and databases, preventing employees and AI agents from seeing the complete picture when it matters.

The conversation challenges another long-standing enterprise technology habit: adding more dashboards.

Massimo explains why dashboards often provide visibility into what has already happened without helping people decide what to do next. Companies can continue adding reporting layers while employees become overwhelmed by information and remain unable to identify the actions that will improve customer experience, productivity, security, or business performance.

A healthcare example demonstrates what becomes possible when companies solve this problem. Massimo shares how CogStack at King's College Hospital brought together unstructured patient information during the COVID-19 pandemic and made it searchable using natural language processing. Clinicians could find relevant information without waiting for technical teams to build new queries or systems, helping medical professionals