Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Zima: AI coding disruption signaled an inevitable shift for data

Colin Zima · He lost his first 5 deals—built the next Looker, raised $250M | Omni · Aug 10, 2026 · at 30:22

Colin Zima is the co-founder and CEO of Omni. He explains what convinced him that generative AI would disrupt enterprise data analysis.

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“When Sonnet came out in October, our engineering team started adopting Claude Code at that point, and it was so obvious that the world had sort of changed in an instant in terms of the way that people were writing code, that it became obvious that it was going to start happening for data too, and even though we didn't believe in it, we started putting these AI features in the product, and our customers started using it.”

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