An Application-Free Future? Speaking Directly to Data with illumex CEO Inna Tokarev Sela

**Inna Tokarev Sela** (0:00)
It's actually about augmentation of jobs. All of us want to make smarter decisions, and this is what allows you to actually be factual about that. AlumX is definitely a playground for machines, humans, data, and applications. So it's a playground when everyone can collaborate. You absolutely have to have this shared context. If each of your models will have separated contexts, they're never aligned. We're actually able to allow our users, our customers to build workflows from different agentic models by different providers and keep them together aligned over the same context.

**Nathan Labenz** (0:39)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, my guest is Inna Tokarev Sela, CEO of AlumX, a startup that helps enterprises get their data speaking the way their employees do, and aims to create an application-free future for knowledge workers. AlumX's approach is super interesting and, at least to me, quite novel. They began by first creating a foundation of canonical, almost platonic, data models that represent how different types of enterprises work, from e-commerce to pharmaceuticals to manufacturing, with idealized implementations of all the little details that are common across such companies. With this foundation, they can then use an automated system that combines knowledge graphs, semantic embeddings, and large language models to automatically analyze companies' metadata, including query logs, API signatures, schema relationships, and so on, so that they can automatically map a specific company's idiosyncratic data environment, complete with all of its inconsistencies, ambiguities, and redundancies, onto their idealized templates, all without requiring any manual data labeling or movement. Once that process is complete and validated by human domain experts from within the company, Elumex can begin to reliably translate natural language questions into database queries and other system calls without Elumex ever seeing the underlying data itself. The value for enterprises can be tremendous, data analysts can be more productive, and leaders can get instant answers 24-7. And the implications for the future of software and work more broadly are potentially profound. While so much of the AI world focuses on creating more and more niche and even personalized applications, Elumex envisions a future in which we interact with our data and other resources through a few core natural language interfaces, such as Slack or Teams. Two things can be true at once, of course, but this vision does strike me as a bit more in line with how I tend to imagine my own future AI-enabled life. With one or a few interfaces to rule them all, and the ability to get questions answered and work done from anywhere via chat or voice interactions, I look forward to one day untethering myself from my desk and spending more time outdoors. All without sacrificing intellectual stimulation or productivity. This conversation has a lot to offer. A fresh take on data architecture, a reminder of the importance of metadata, a visionary approach to the challenge of reasoning over messy enterprise data that strikes me as both effective and perhaps even defensible, and even a bit of insight into the psychology of enterprise decision makers who need help building trust in AI systems even as they can clearly see its incredible potential.
If app-making platforms like Bolt and Lovable represent the beginning of a software supernova, the Lumex seems to me to foreshadow the software black hole that might follow, in which interfaces and applications collapse to a single point. As always, if you're finding value in the show, we'd appreciate it if you take a moment to share it with friends or read a review, and we always welcome your feedback via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, or by DMing me on your favorite social network. For now, I hope you enjoyed this thought-provoking conversation on AI-enabled enterprise data analysis and the possibility of an application-free future with Inna Tokarev Sela, CEO of Elumex. Inna Tokarev Sela, CEO at Elumex. Welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Inna Tokarev Sela** (4:01)
Thank you for having me over, Nathan. I'm happy to be here.

**Nathan Labenz** (4:04)
Yeah, I'm looking forward to the conversation. So right off the bat, on your homepage, the call to action is get your data speaking the way your employees do. And I think this is a really interesting space. It's kind of a subset of AI-assisted coding, heavy sort of into the paradigm of tool use. And it seems like you're on the verge, like so many different companies are, of transforming a job role, I guess I would say. And I'm really looking forward to unpacking it both from kind of the technical underpinning standpoint and also the way that you think it's going to and perhaps are already seeing it impacting the way that your customers are conducting their businesses. So for starters, when you started the company in 2021, right? That's what I saw in my research.