About

I'm Christopher Schmidt. I'm VP, Solutions Engineering and AI - Enterprise AI at iLink Digital, where I lead the Microsoft IQ practice, and I created the Data and AI Readiness Framework (DARF) — a two-pillar model for whether an organization can trust an AI system's answer, and separately, whether it can trust that system to act on it.

I write Real Time Dispatch, a weekly newsletter covering ontologies, streaming systems, event-driven architectures, and the shift from historical reporting to embedding analytics directly into business processes. It's also where DARF's ideas get argued in public before they land in the framework itself.

My focus is enterprise AI — specifically the operational boundary where agentic systems need grounded, live state and governed authority to act safely, not just correct answers. Microsoft Fabric's Real Time Intelligence stack — Eventhouse, Eventstream, Activator, and KQL — is where I build and prove that out in practice, but the underlying question is platform-agnostic: how organizations move from dashboards to action systems that respond to events as they happen.

Before this, I spent years working across data warehousing, real-time systems, semantic modeling, and enterprise analytics. That background shapes how I think about the tradeoffs between batch and streaming, and why most organizations are further from true operational intelligence than they realize.

I speak at conferences and user groups on Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence — recent stops include FabCon & SQLCon, DATACON Seattle, and SQLSaturday Pittsburgh — see Speaking.