What does the future look like for business intelligence?

For years, business intelligence has been synonymous with dashboards. Rows of charts, filters, and KPIs that require interpretation and follow-up. Tools like Power BI and Tableau helped us go from raw data to insights, but the final step has always rested on the human: make a decision, take an action, push forward.

I think that’ll change.

We’re entering a world where analytics doesn’t just answer what happened; it responds to what now? The future of BI is conversational, contextual, and capable of taking action.

Why static dashboards fall short

Dashboards are great when you:

• Know what question to ask
• Know where to look
• You have time to explore

When you’re in a fast-moving business environment and toggling between sales ops, customer escalations, and next month’s forecast, you don’t have time to filter and bounce around to 10 different dashboards.

What you really want to ask is:

• What’s our highest open invoice and who own’s the account
• Which projects are trending late this week
• How’s our team utilization to plan in the customer engagement practic

More importantly, you want the system to do something about it. Assign someone to fix the issue, notify the right person, trigger an update in CRM, or escalate via Teams.

That’s really what business intelligence will become.

From action to insight

Tools like Microsoft Copilot, you.com, MCP servers, and orchestration platforms are flipping the script. Instead of human-triggered insights, we get LLM-powered understanding of questions, schema-grounded answers, and actions via APIs and workflow tools.

In practice, this means a VP of Sales can ask in plain English for pipeline risk, get a filtered list, and re-assign accounts where necessary. This means that a project manager can ask “which consultants are under 70% utilized this quarter” and get an adaptive card in Teams to help them slot into an available project. This means that a CFO say “summarize operating margin changes in the last 6 weeks and alert me if we dip between 15% again”.

This entire thing will live in a tool like Slack, Teams, or a custom app.

The next generation of BI isn’t a tool

In the same way we went from command lines to GUI, we’re now moving from interfaces to intent.

The winners in this next era won’t be companies with the best dashboards – it’ll be the ones with the shortest loops between insight, decision, and action.

In the future, you won’t build charts, you won’t select filters; you’ll just ask. The system will know what to do next.

In the meantime

Dashboards, reports, and KPIs are still the best we got. Want help building some, let Tapestries Group know.