Is ai to Tableau what vlookup is to excel?

As Ben Thompson from Stratechery wrote on Google’s acquistion of Looker “data analytics and visualization is a large and growing segment in enterprise software”.

As Boris Evelson from Forrester points out, BI tools have reached technological maturity in certain areas such as d”atabase connectivity and data ingestion, security, data visualization, and slice-and-dice OLAP capabilities”.

At the same time he points out the lack of demand:

Fifty-six percent of global data and analytics decision makers (seniority level of manager or above) say their firms are currently in the beginner stage of their insights-driven transformation. Further anecdotal evidence shows that enterprises use no more than 20% of their data for insights, and less than 20% of knowledge workers use enterprise BI applications, still preferring spreadsheets and other shadow IT approaches.

The reasons are – as he points out – “the low maturity of the people/process/data”.

BI-vendors are trying to solve this issue by extending their solutions into E2E-tools;

Considers Pentaho’s integration with Lumada:

Lumada’s focus is on covering the entire data lifecycle, from the integration of various data sources to the evaluation of video and IoT data in compliance with DSGVO regulations and their deployment in self-service applications. Pentaho’s plans for its Business Analytics module will focus on meeting the daily needs of data engineers and data scientists in the AI and ML area. The goal is to support all data users, from data engineers and data stewards to analysts, data scientists and business users.

(From the Pentaho User Meeting 2020)

Or Tableau’s integration of Salesforce’s Einstein Analytics

Moreover, cloud vendors are moving into the area of BI. Similarly to Google’s acquistion of Looker Clouder has announced a feature for data engineering and data visualization.

Based on this E2E-integration, the ease of use these companies promise (e. g. NLP-based BI-dashboards), and the trend towards cloud-solutions the question emerges: How specialized will BI tools be in the future? For instance, Excel including features like VLOOKUP have become omnipresent in organizations. Similarly, will currently less present BI-tools with their AI-features become as present as Excel with its VLOOKUP?

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