It is hard to recall a busier year in the world of Business Intelligence. If one thing defined 2023, it was a phrase almost nobody in this sector used twelve months ago: generative AI. The success of ChatGPT in late 2022 set off a race among every vendor to bring large language models into data analysis. Let us look back on a year of announcements, previews and plenty of promises still to be confirmed.
The thread of the year: generative AI bursts into analytics
The pattern repeated at every vendor: through the spring, one after another unveiled its bet on generative AI applied to BI. The shared promise — generating reports, summaries and natural-language answers — went from science fiction to the headline item on every roadmap in a matter of months.
It is worth stressing the nuance that often gets lost amid the headlines: almost everything announced this year is a preview or a pilot, not a settled product. 2023 was the year of the announcement; the year of maturity is still to come. We unpack what all this means in our article on generative AI and Business Intelligence.
The big announcements of 2023
Three weeks in May concentrated much of the year’s news:
- Microsoft — 23 May, at Build. Microsoft unveiled Microsoft Fabric, its new unified data and analytics platform, alongside Copilot in Power BI, both in public preview. It was the most ambitious announcement of the year: unifying ingestion, storage, analytics and generative AI in a single product. We break it down in what is Microsoft Fabric and in our look at Copilot in Power BI.
- Salesforce / Tableau — 9 May. Salesforce announced Tableau GPT and Tableau Pulse, its generative-AI capabilities built on Einstein GPT, promising automatic summaries and a more conversational experience. They entered pilot later in the year.
- Qlik — 16 May. Qlik completed its acquisition of Talend, strengthening its offering in data transformation, quality and governance. A telling move: while the sector rushed towards conversing with data, Qlik bet on the foundation that makes it reliable. Its assisted analytics in 2023 remains Insight Advisor, over the associative engine, and that emphasis in Qlik consulting shapes its approach for the year.
Natural language was the great cross-cutting theme, as we cover in the rise of natural language in BI.
Gartner names the 2023 leaders
In its 2023 Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI Platforms, Gartner placed Microsoft, Tableau, Qlik and ThoughtSpot as leaders. A snapshot that confirms who starts with an advantage for the new stage generative AI opens up, though the report itself lands before the real effect of the spring’s announcements is visible.
What remains to be seen
The enthusiasm of 2023 is best tempered by the questions still open:
- Maturity. Many of these capabilities are previews. The leap from an impressive demo to a reliable product in production is the challenge of the coming months.
- Governance. An AI that answers confidently over inconsistent data is more dangerous than useful. Qlik’s Talend acquisition points precisely at that concern.
- From demo to product. We will have to see how much of what was promised reaches users’ hands, and at what cost — in both licensing and implementation effort.
The underlying lesson of the year does not change: generative AI amplifies what you already have. Over tidy data, it delivers; over chaotic data, it accelerates the chaos. That is why this year we have insisted so much on the foundation: a clean model, defined metrics, and the idea of treating data as a data product with an owner and guarantees.
What we can sense for 2024
It would be reckless to promise specific products, but the direction seems clear: the previews of 2023 should start turning into available features, the debate will centre on reliability and governance, and the organisations that have done their homework with their data will be the ones that genuinely ride the wave. 2023 put the promises on the table; 2024 will have to prove them.
At Digital Fox Data we help companies build that foundation with our Business Intelligence consulting, so that the new generation of AI in BI adds value rather than noise. If you want to prepare your organisation for what is coming, let’s talk.