Juan & Tim rant w/ Jesus Barrasa about Ontologies, Knowledge Graphs, Context Graphs and AI

In this candid Friday rant session recorded at a brewery in Austin, ServiceNow hosts Juan and Tim welcome special guest Jesus Barrasa, Field CTO for AI at Neo, to dive deep into the resurgence of ontologies, knowledge graphs, and context graphs in the age of AI. The conversation kicks off with a playful exploration of how AI is reshaping work—accelerating productivity, increasing expectations, and creating new challenges around human oversight and decision quality. The core of the episode centers on demystifying ontologies: defining them as formal, explicit, shared models of a domain, with two primary purposes—interoperability across teams and enabling machine-readable automation through inferencing and consistency checks. Jesus emphasizes that while the hype around AI-driven ontologies is real, the real value lies not in building ontologies for their own sake, but in using them to power smarter agents, improve data quality, and capture decision traces as context. The hosts and guest debate whether context graphs will become standalone platforms or just features, ultimately concluding that the true innovation is in embedding feedback loops and traceability into workflows from the start. The episode ends with a call to action: focus on the 'why' behind building ontologies and share tangible use cases to drive real progress. Key takeaways include: 1) Ontologies are not an end in themselves but tools to enable interoperability and automation; 2) AI accelerates ontology creation, but human expertise is still essential for refinement; 3) Capturing decision traces and context as graphs is critical for building trustworthy, learnable systems; 4) The real value of AI isn't just in generating content, but in enabling faster, more strategic experimentation; 5) Companies should start with clear use cases—like guiding LLMs with domain knowledge or improving data quality—before building any infrastructure.