I recently attended a series of marketing-centric webinars hosted by industry-leading enterprise data cloud vendors, all proclaiming that the business intelligence (BI) dashboard is unofficially dead and that Generative AI-based cloud data platform interfaces would provide a renaissance, if not a clear path to redemption for the future of business intelligence. Further, some recent architectural efforts I’ve been associated with also suggested that many large enterprises in multiple verticals struggle with data operations and the need for dynamic, outcome-driven interaction with data beyond investments in data lake houses, medallion or lambda architectures, and semantic models. All of these are foundational to making BI useful.
After some reflection, I was forced to consider the very real possibility that the BI landscape had not really diversified significantly in at least a decade. To be fair, industry leaders like Microsoft and Salesforce (Power BI and Tableau respectively) according to Gartner, have a significant installed base in the BI client arena and provide tooling that is sophisticated and evolved enough to engage business decision makers with compelling data and data visualizations yet, as I noted in Data trust and the evolution of enterprise analytics in the age of AI, 58% of business decisionmakers rely on gut feel or experience rather than data and information.
While much of the issue is data trust, a larger portion is also based on the need for democratized inquiry, interaction, discovery and most of all, time-to-execution. Creating a semantic layer that is chained to static dashboards doesn’t really provide a significant advantage for anyone who needs to operate at the speed of business. The new basis of competition and market differentiator is not just time-to-insight, it is also time-to-execution. According to Besemer Venture Partners, unlocking data with a path to execution as opposed to aggregating and storing data means moving from “systems of record to systems of action.” So, what is the path forward to enabling both insight and action?
