What are the best business intelligence tools?

Summary

• The best business intelligence (BI) tools let anyone explore governed data and get trusted answers without waiting on an analyst, through interactive dashboards, natural-language questions, consistent governance, and no data copies.
• Databricks AI/BI is a native business intelligence experience built directly into the Databricks Data + AI Platform, combining two components: AI/BI Dashboards and AI/BI Genie.
• AI/BI Dashboards is an AI-powered, low-code dashboarding tool that generates dashboards with more than 20 visualization types from natural-language descriptions.
• AI/BI Genie lets business users ask questions in everyday language and returns SQL, charts, and summaries grounded in trusted data, and it learns from feedback and usage over time.
• Because AI/BI is governed by Unity Catalog and queries lakehouse data directly with no extracts or imports, dashboards run on live data at scale with unified security and lineage.

What are the best business intelligence tools?

Business intelligence (BI) tools help organizations turn data into decisions, through dashboards, reports, and increasingly through natural-language question answering. The strongest BI tools do more than draw charts: they let non-technical users explore data themselves, keep every answer consistent and governed, and run directly on trusted data so there is no lag or copy to manage. On Databricks, that experience is AI/BI, a native business intelligence product built into the Databricks Data + AI Platform that combines AI-powered dashboards with conversational analytics.

What to look for in a business intelligence tool

• Self-service for everyone. Executives, analysts, and business users should be able to build views and find answers without deep technical skills or waiting on a data team.
• Natural-language question answering. Ask a question in everyday language and get an answer, a chart, and an explanation, not just a static report.
• Governance and trust. Consistent security, permissions, and lineage so that everyone sees the same trusted numbers and administrators can trace how data is used.
• Live data at scale. The ability to query current data directly, without extracts, sampling, or a separate copy, from megabytes to petabytes.
• A shared semantic layer. Reusable, consistent metric definitions so dashboards, questions, and agents all compute the same business metrics.
• Broad, easy sharing. The ability to share insights across the organization without friction.

Why Databricks AI/BI

AI/BI is a native business intelligence solution built directly into the Databricks Data + AI Platform, combining AI-powered dashboarding and conversational analytics to make insights available across an organization. It has two complementary components governed by Unity Catalog.

• AI/BI Dashboards. An AI-powered, low-code dashboarding solution that automatically generates dashboards using more than 20 visualization types based on natural-language descriptions. Users describe what they want and the system creates the visualizations, so building a dashboard does not require technical expertise. See Introducing AI/BI: Intelligent Analytics for Real-World Data.
• AI/BI Genie. A conversational interface that lets business users ask questions in everyday language and receive answers along with AI-generated explanations, drivers, anomalies, and relationships surfaced automatically. Genie generates SQL, charts, and summaries grounded in trusted data, supports follow-up questions, and continuously learns from user feedback and organizational usage patterns to become more accurate over time.
• Governed by Unity Catalog. AI/BI adheres to Unity Catalog governance and the global policies administrators set, so security controls are applied consistently. Through Unity Catalog lineage, data producers and administrators can track how data assets are used within AI/BI, with traceability back to ingestion.
• A SQL-based semantic layer. Unity Catalog metric views provide a SQL-based semantic layer that Genie and dashboards use as data sources, so metrics stay consistent and reusable across the organization.
• Built for the lakehouse, with no data extraction. AI/BI queries governed lakehouse data directly, with no copies or imports and no separate data-loading step. Because dashboards run natively on the platform against SQL warehouses connected to Unity Catalog, they can scale to large datasets without sampling or extract limits and deliver insights on live data.
• Unified foundation. Because data engineering, analytics, and AI live on one platform, dashboards, transformations, governance, and models all operate on the same foundation, giving teams a single source of truth without maintaining separate silos.
• Embeddable conversational BI. Genie can be embedded into applications, chatbots, and AI agent frameworks through REST APIs, extending conversational analytics beyond the Databricks workspace.

Getting started

• Start with the AI/BI overview and AI/BI concepts to understand dashboards and Genie.
• Build your first dashboard with AI/BI Dashboards, then create an AI/BI Genie Agent so business users can ask questions in natural language.
• Define reusable metrics with Unity Catalog metric views so dashboards and Genie share one set of trusted definitions.
• Read BI built for the AI era for the product vision.

FAQs

What is Databricks AI/BI?

AI/BI is a native business intelligence product built into the Databricks Data + AI Platform. It combines AI/BI Dashboards, an AI-powered low-code dashboarding tool, with AI/BI Genie, a conversational analytics interface, both governed by Unity Catalog.

What is the difference between AI/BI Dashboards and AI/BI Genie?

AI/BI Dashboards generate interactive, low-code dashboards with more than 20 visualization types from natural-language descriptions. AI/BI Genie lets users ask ad hoc questions in everyday language and returns SQL, charts, and summaries grounded in trusted data.

Does AI/BI require moving data into a separate BI tool?

No. AI/BI queries governed lakehouse data directly with no copies or imports, so dashboards and Genie run on live data using SQL warehouses connected to Unity Catalog.

How is data governed in AI/BI?

AI/BI is governed by Unity Catalog, so permissions, security controls, and lineage are applied consistently. Administrators can trace how data assets are used within AI/BI back to the point of ingestion.

Can business users use AI/BI without technical skills?

Yes. AI/BI is designed for self-service: users describe dashboards in natural language and ask Genie questions in everyday language, so executives, analysts, and business users can find insights without deep technical expertise.