The Power of AI in Business Intelligence: A New Era

Introduction

Business intelligence (BI) is undergoing a transformation as data intelligence (DI) brings democratized access to data to everyone across organizations. DI refers to using artificial intelligence (AI) to learn, understand and reason on an organization’s data. Having AI that can reason on your data empowers employees to self-serve dashboards and reports, enabling BI usage across all levels of the organization.

What is behind the rise of data intelligence? To start, GenAI and natural language processing (NLP) allow users to phrase their requests for data in business terms, rather than requiring the precision of a data scientist, data analyst or other skilled practitioner. At the same time, data lakehouses break down silos across data warehouses and data lakes and bring together the best elements of each system to consolidate data into a unified platform that GenAI can query. With all the data, usage patterns and business semantics in a central location, AI can develop reasoning for true data intelligence that is tailored to your company and the unique way it operates.

Databricks AI in Business Intelligence

Databricks brings data intelligence to the enterprise with Databricks AI/BI Dashboards, Genie and other workload assistance features. AI/BI uses a compound AI system to learn and share learnings from data interactions across your company, offering unique insights across the BI lifecycle. By applying semantic understanding to data, documentation, existing dashboards, notebooks and queries and considering recent activities, the popularity of searches and data lineage, the AI system of agents creates an AI/BI experience based on the way your company operates.

With this tailored understanding of your business and custom large language models (LLMs), Databricks AI/BI unlocks self-service scenarios across your organization. Employees can ask questions and dig deeper into data without requiring changes to existing queries and dashboards. When visualizations and dashboards are required, they are easier to create with low-code solutions and drag and drop functionality. The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform and AI/BI empowers everyone to get the most out of the company’s data to make the best business decisions.

Democratizing data access to Analyst and BI developers

Analysts and BI developers can leverage Databricks Assistant, AI functions and AI/BI Dashboards to save time and increase accuracy when creating queries and dashboards.

Databricks Assistant: The Assistant can help your data analysts generate SQL queries from conversational language and explain complex code, empowering a broader range of employees to more quickly create their own queries and dashboards. The Assistant can help more seasoned BI developers transition between projects faster by summarizing, generating and suggesting fixes for SQL and Python code as they ramp up on new areas.

AI Functions: AI Functions allows direct access to LLMs from SQL, as a built-in Databricks SQL function. Instead of tasking your data and machine learning engineers with creating classification models and new processes, they can leverage the power of LLMs to develop a prompt and call it directly from SQL.

AI/BI Dashboards: Analysts and developers can use AI-assisted authoring to quickly create dashboards for the business teams they support. AI/BI Dashboards streamline the configuration experience and offer an enhanced visualization library, making it easy to create and share dashboards with everyone in your organization.

Self-Service BI for Consumers

Consumers can use AI to more easily understand company dashboards and converse with AI/BI Genie to get quick answers to their data questions, without taking time away from your data analysts.

Genie: AI/BI Genie is a no-code AI-powered feature that allows your business users to drill down into the data and ask more specific questions beyond what is shown in the dashboards. Natural language processing facilitates a conversational experience where dashboard consumers can ask the questions they would normally ask a coworker or the dashboard author and get self-service answers. With generative AI, Genie learns terminology and data practices specific to your business and continues to improve and adapt based on user feedback.

The Future of AI in Business Intelligence

As machine learning and generative AI continue to evolve, the future of BI will see a dramatic shift toward even greater accessibility and automation. With AI’s ability to learn from entire data ecosystems—including business semantics, data lineage and usage patterns—BI tools will increasingly allow non-technical users to engage with complex datasets through natural language. This will empower broader organizational participation in data analysis. Custom LLMs tailored to business contexts will further drive precision in AI-generated insights, improving decision-making at all levels. As AI-driven self-service analytics becomes more intelligent and ubiquitous, BI systems will seamlessly integrate with everyday business workflows, enabling faster, more accurate insights without requiring deep technical expertise.

Looking for more information, tips and best practices around data intelligence, AI/BI Dashboards and AI/BI Genie? We’ve got you covered: