The key here is to always have some structured intermediate layer that can allow people to evaluate what it is the system thinks they're asking, short of the full complexity of SQL. You'll need something like this for disambiguation anyway - are "Jon Favreau movies" movies starring or directed by Jon Favreau? Or do you mean the other Jon Favreau? Don't one-shot anything important end to end from language. Use language to guide users towards unambiguous and easy to reason about compositions of smaller abstractions.
I think AI to direct SQL will have use cases, but I personally have found it more of a fun toy than anything close to the main way I would interact with my data, at least in the course of running a business.
I am a fan of a semantic layer (I made an open source one but there are others out there), and think having AI talk to a semantic layer has potential. Though TBH a good UI over a semantic layer is so easy it makes the natural language approach moot.
