Rate the Hype: NL-to-SQL and Governance without the Vendor Tax

Every year the modern data/AI landscape gets more crowded. Honest opinions about what's worth building are rare. We took some of the loudest trends (open table formats, semantic layers, MCP servers, vector databases, data mesh, and data governance) and rated each one: Adopt Now, Experiment, Watch, or Ignore. Not based on vendor pitches but on what we've deployed at Abridge, an AI-native healthcare company where we process clinical conversations under HIPAA in real time. Then we will prove it. We will present a natural language to SQL interface that 10xed data-to-insight speed for our consumers. A HIPPA scanner that shows governance doesn't require a vendor. Two engineers, two demos, and field-tested answers on what to ship in production and what you can skip.