The Future Of Self-Service Analytics Is AI-Powered

If you were born before the turn of the century, you’ll probably remember what roadtrips used to look like. Driving cross-country involved a paper map and observing a bunch of landmarks to make sure you were headed the right way.

Today, you pull out your phone and ask Waze or Google Maps to get to where you need to go. It will even change its course ‘en route’ if there’s a quicker way to avoid traffic jams or closures.

With rapid advancements in technology, especially in artificial intelligence, this is just one of many examples of how our lives have become easier. And it’s no different when it comes to data-driven decision making.

Self-service analytics is the new standard, but with the coming of generative AI, its future is about to be turned upside down.

The flaws of traditional self-service business intelligence

When we think of self-service business intelligence, the first thing that comes to mind is “drag and drop”. The whole idea is that non-technical users can explore and visualize data without needing a data analyst or data scientist.

Although traditional self-service BI solutions have paved the way to data democratization, they are no longer enough. In today’s rapidly changing world, we increasingly feel the need to make the best decisions in the least amount of time. And we can no longer “drag and drop” our way out of it.

Traditional self-service BI has multiple flaws standing in the way of fast decision-making:

• Data analysis is an isolated workflow. You need to pull datasets from many different data sources, and load them into a separate business intelligence tool. This tedious task costs precious time you don’t have.
• The user experience is clunky. Traditional BI tools are often difficult to navigate for people without a background in data science.
• They lead to analysis paralysis. In the hands of someone who is not familiar with data, there are hundreds of visualizations you could build. Too many data points will leave beginners lost and confused.

All people want is some data-backed evidence to make informed decisions. But with traditional tools, it still requires a lot of effort (and help from your IT department) to get access to simple metrics. So how do we speed things up?

Bringing self-service BI to our favorite apps and tools

There is a clear need for bite-size insights, offered to us on a platter. As a result, software vendors get more and more requests from users to offer data insights inside their apps.

For many software builders, this is a major challenge. Because of the limitations of traditional tools, most product builders have been forced to offer analytics as follows:

❌ Data exports to Excel, which is a quick way to give users data access without having to build a complex reporting system, but it’s not very friendly to business users.

❌ Integrations with major BI tools, assuming that most of their customers are already using a tool like Microsoft Power BI or Tableau.

❌ Developing custom data visualizations in-house to add to their product, which takes a lot of time, yet offers insight that is too basic for most users.

None of these options is user-friendly to your product users - or your engineering team - but luckily there is a better way. With modern BI solutions, software products can inject a full suite of self-service BI tools straight into their apps or platforms.

✅ Pre-built interactive dashboards will guide users to better business decisions faster

✅ On top of that, users can explore their own data and edit dashboards to get the tailored information they need

✅ They don’t need to leave your software: everything is embedded directly inside their existing apps and workflows.

With innovative tools like Luzmo’s embedded dashboard editor, the next phase of data literacy has come. As a software developer, you no longer have to waste time on building data analytics from scratch. Instead, you plug self-service analytics straight into your apps, like a building block.

And meanwhile, your users are getting real-time insights, tailored to their context, in a guided and intuitive way. They no longer have to rely on a prebuilt report. Instead, end-users of your software can adapt visualizations and tweak them to their specific needs, for a fully personalized experience. Or they can even start from a blank canvas, and build completely new visualizations to explore their data the way they prefer.

This leaves us with one final question. What will AI bring into the mix?

The future of self-serve is AI-powered

While ease of use and accessibility of insights have improved largely compared to traditional BI tools, the way people interact with data is changing constantly.

With the rising popularity of ChatGPT and large language models, using natural language to analyze data is becoming the norm. And if you’re building a data-powered product, your interface needs to be in tune with your customers' expectations.

In the future, self-service analytics tools will be language-powered. Already today, new innovative tools are available for data teams and decision-makers to ask questions in plain English, and get insights in return.

With Luzmo’s latest release, AI-powered charts are already a reality. With a simple prompt, anyone can ask a question about their data, and get an interactive data visualization in return. And with anyone, we really mean anyone. Starting as soon as today, you can embed this entire interface - from self-service analytics to AI-powered charts - inside any web application you’re building.

Whatever your use case - whether you have a marketing app, an HR software or a financial platform - your users can enjoy this functionality directly inside your application.

AI-guided interfaces like these will make data analysis even more natural, directly inside the apps we use on a daily basis. And for people like you who build those apps, that means more added value, more usage on your platform and more growth for your SaaS business.

Prepare your software for the future with Luzmo

With the help of AI and machine learning, we’re going towards full automation of the decision-making process. No more bottlenecks, no more silos. Any stakeholder can make sense of their data, inside the tools they use on a daily basis.

If your customers want all the benefits of data-driven decision making, but you don’t want to spend months building AI-powered advanced analytics, look no further. Let Luzmo do the heavy lifting for you. Use an off-the-shelf analytics component, and plug it into your application in days, not months.

‍Book a demo with our product experts to bring your data to life with AI-powered data products!