Is your BI Environment ready for AI?

We’re one-quarter of the way through the 21st century, and already we’ve seen massive transformation in data and analytics.

In 2005, the era of big data arrived. Then, in 2015, the release of Microsoft Power BI ushered in the democratization of business intelligence.

In 2025, product roadmaps and marketing budgets are all signalling that AI will dominate the next decade, if not the rest of the century. Many of our brightest minds believe this revolution will dwarf the impact of any era that came before it.

But, amid all of the hype, it’s important to remember that the future doesn’t erase the past.

Each period of transformation builds on the last, and change is cyclical. Infrastructure, tools, workflows, and best practices aren’t ripped out and replaced. Rather, components are swapped, refined, and calibrated to an organization’s particular needs.

It is in this work that a vision of the future is filled in, until it becomes the living present.

In business intelligence, we’ve taken giant steps on the journey to self-service analytics over the last decade. Capabilities to gather, catalog, analyze, and visualize data have grown more powerful, and they are now in the hands of more users. The consumption layer has become the critical point where users interact with data, and data turns into data products.

There is more data, sitting in more tools, that are accessed by more people, to generate more reports and dashboards.