Some thoughts on last mile data visualization and the impending wave of AI for business intelligence.
Over the past 6 weeks, I've met with 6 companies attempting to disrupt the current market for business intelligence tools (loosely led today by Tableau, Looker, etc).
Each company was centered around natural language. It makes a ton of sense. If we strip away SQL skill from data analysis, we democratize the ability to get useful answers out of datasets. Boom, winning.
One (admittedly biased) request for all these young startups: please give more attention to the charted outputs.
Lots of BI use cases are internal only. You want to spin up a dashboard that tells you how many leads are in which stage of your marketing / sales pipeline. You need a table identifying which customers are within 30 days of their renewal date. Etc etc etc.
But many, many use cases are external (or at least, design is a prerequisite). Sharing data with a partner. Building a deck for executives. Using market data in the first sales call. All of these demand good-looking, on-brand charts.
This wave fits in very neatly with my current assumption that Insights as a function within B2B marketing is set to explode over the coming years. The same tech that will make blah marketing content 10x easier to create will also lower the technical skill needed to create kickass data content.
Unfortunately for the startups in the space, I do see the leaders adopting these generative AI techniques in the very near future. Finding a true differentiation in AI seems more difficult than in prior tech changeovers, but maybe I'm missing something!
If you're building in this space, please reach out. I'd love to be a thought partner as you invent the future of data analysis. Especially if you're focused on the design part ___
(Charts below built in Tableau, showing the same data. Could have built 30 separate vizzes, each with pros and cons. Sifting through the options will become a matter of taste)
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