A new category
The BI and governance contracts up for renewal in 2027 will be read against a new question: is the architecture underneath ready for AI on top of the data, for agents doing the plumbing analysts avoid, for answers a DPO can sign off on. Most platforms reached for that answer after the fact. Lumen was written around it.
01What we are
The surface
LumenAsk in natural language, get an answer with the query, the chart, the narrative, and the sources attached. The AI does the plumbing the analyst hates; the human owns the judgement. Every cell is reproducible, every chart links to its query, refusal is honest when the data won't support a claim.
The trust layer
SubstrateLumen does not trust the agent; it trusts the substrate around the agent. Curated by a data steward and compiled into governed SQL on every query, with audit attached to every answer. The same enforcement chain runs whether the consumer is Lumen, an agent over MCP, a REST client, or a future BI tool. There is no bypass.
02Why this works when “talk to your data” did not
Pseudonymisation happens before the prompt is built. The external LLM never sees what it should not see.
Row-level access, masking, disclosure thresholds are compiled into the SQL. No client can bypass.
“I cannot answer this from the available sources” is a typed output with a named category, not a hallucinated number. The system would rather decline than guess.
03Open source
Lumen is available as open source software under the Apache License 2.0. You can review the codebase, evaluate the architecture, and follow development in public.
Repository: github.com/LukV/lumen
04Next step