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It’s the end of BI as we know it (and I feel fine)
Orion by Gravity’s Lucas Thelosen on AI analysts, trusted numbers, and maintained context
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▶ Watch the full episode and read the transcript: Lucas Thelosen on the Data Faces Podcast
At almost every data, analytics, and AI conference I’ve attended lately, someone on stage has announced that BI is dead, so I asked Lucas Thelosen directly: is BI dead? He built one of the largest Looker consultancies, helped lead Looker into Google, and now builds an AI analyst. “It’s always evolving,” he said, but one thing is different this time. If you ask the product leaders at the major dashboarding products, “they will tell you in private that actual usage numbers are really low.”
That matches my previous experience. I’ve spent years marketing analytics software at Dell, TIBCO, Alteryx, and other vendors, and we all promised analytics for everybody. Yet most companies ended up with thousands of dashboards and little insight. The data is slightly dated but still relevant: when BARC and Eckerson Group measured it, about 25 percent of employees actively used BI and analytics tools, a figure that had barely moved in seven years.[1]
“The average employee…
