What should I look for when choosing an enterprise BI platform?

Summary

• Start with the capabilities that matter at enterprise scale: natural-language self-service, automatically surfaced insights, low-code dashboard authoring, enterprise governance with consistent metric definitions, and the ability to run directly on live, large datasets instead of sampled extracts.
• Look for a unified platform, not another silo — a BI layer built into your data and AI platform avoids duplicating data, reconciling conflicting KPIs, and stitching separate tools together.
• Databricks delivers enterprise BI through AI/BI, built natively into the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, with two experiences: AI/BI Dashboards and Genie.
• Genie lets business users ask questions in natural language and self-serve analytics; AI/BI Dashboards give analysts a low-code way to build interactive visualizations described in natural language.
• Because AI/BI runs on Databricks SQL and inherits Unity Catalog governance, it analyzes enterprise-scale data without extract limits and keeps access controls, lineage, and metric definitions consistent across the organization.

What should I look for when choosing an enterprise BI platform?

Choosing an enterprise BI platform comes down to a few capabilities that separate tools that scale from tools that stall. Look for natural-language, conversational self-service so non-technical users can answer their own questions; automatically surfaced insights; low-code dashboard authoring; enterprise-grade governance with consistent, shared metric definitions; and the ability to run directly on large, live datasets instead of sampled extracts. Just as important, look for a platform that is unified with your data and AI stack, so you are not duplicating data into a separate system or reconciling conflicting KPIs across tools. Databricks delivers all of these through AI/BI, a business intelligence solution built natively into the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform.

Why Databricks AI/BI for enterprise business intelligence

• Conversational self-service with Genie. AI/BI Genie lets business users ask questions in natural language and self-serve analytics without waiting on analysts. It uses a compound AI system that learns your metadata, relationships, metrics, and query patterns from Unity Catalog, generating increasingly accurate answers over time. See Bringing AI/BI Genie to your business teams.
• Low-code, natural-language dashboards. AI/BI Dashboards give analysts a low-code way to build highly interactive visualizations described in natural language, delivering fast, secure visual insights across the organization.
• Scale on live data, not extracts. AI/BI is powered by Databricks SQL and the Photon engine, so it analyzes datasets from megabytes to petabytes without the size and latency limits of extracts — you work with complex, real-world data directly and keep it fresh rather than copied into a separate BI store.
• Unified governance and consistent metrics. Because AI/BI is native to the platform, it inherits Unity Catalog governance: centralized access controls, audit trails, lineage, and business definitions (metrics, dimensions, rules) shared across dashboards, SQL queries, and AI agents — so teams see consistent KPIs instead of reconciling conflicting numbers.
• Access for every business user with Databricks One. Databricks One gives business teams a simple, safe entry point to AI/BI Dashboards, Genie Agents, and Databricks Apps without navigating a technical workspace, and it is available to all Databricks SQL customers. See One platform for enterprise intelligence.
• One platform end to end. Because BI is built into the same platform that powers data engineering, warehousing, and AI, insights stay consistent from raw data to dashboard and teams avoid stitching together separate systems.

Getting started

• Explore the Databricks business intelligence product page.
• Learn about AI/BI Dashboards and AI/BI Genie.
• See how business users get access with Databricks One.
• Read the AI/BI documentation.

FAQs

What capabilities matter most in an enterprise BI platform?

Natural-language self-service, automatically surfaced insights, low-code dashboard authoring, enterprise governance with consistent metric definitions, and the ability to run directly on large, live datasets rather than sampled extracts.

What is Databricks AI/BI?

AI/BI is a business intelligence solution built into the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. It pairs AI/BI Dashboards for low-code, natural-language visualization authoring with Genie for conversational, natural-language analysis.

Do business users need to write SQL to use AI/BI?

No. Genie lets business users ask questions in everyday language, and AI/BI Dashboards let analysts author visualizations by describing what they want in natural language.

How does AI/BI stay governed at enterprise scale?

AI/BI is native to the platform and inherits Unity Catalog governance, lineage, and fine-grained access control, and it runs on Databricks SQL so it can analyze enterprise-scale data without extracts.