Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

This week, we had a chat with one of our enterprise customers about their thoughts on AI inside their Yellowfin environment. They’re currently running version 9.15 and use Yellowfin as the primary BI layer inside their app.

For today’s CTOs and CIOs, the pressure to deliver actionable data insights within your products has never been higher. However, a critical dilemma often stalls your progress toward the business intelligence tools you need for the task: Should your engineering team build a bespoke analytics engine from scratch, or should you integrate a professional embedded solution?

Power to the people to make a point. According to Robert Gaskins 1, one of the original creators, that was the reasoning behind PowerPoint’s name, and alongside Google Slides and Keynote, it remains one of the World’s most powerful presentation software. Blog Contents show What is the problem with traditional presentation software? What you can do in Yellowfin Present? How can I make my presentations better using Yellowfin Story feature?

Running a vacation rental is a laborious task. Communicating with guests, managing cleaning staff, developing a pricing strategy… It's all time-consuming work. What makes it harder is that many decisions are made with partial information: a sense that “this month felt busy,” a hunch that prices might be too low, or a vague feeling that one booking channel is starting to dominate. That’s how intuition quietly replaces evidence.

Without a fuel gauge in your car, you'd have to rely on gut feeling to know when to fill up, and that's risky. You might end up stranded on an empty road without gas. The same principle applies to software we use every day. Embedding analytics (charts, graphs, reports and dashboards) into your app means your users can base their decisions on fast, powerful visualizations of real-time data.

Executives sometimes seem to want two things at once. Fast answers inside operational tools, and strict control over sensitive data in business analytics. The problem is friction. Many security controls add prompts, delays, and blocked screens. Users work around them or develop “muscle memory” where they click a button without fully taking in the meaning of the text they see - or have not consciously seen. If you cast your mind back, does that seem familiar to you?

October 2025, Paris. Thieves dressed as construction workers break into the Louvre and steal eight pieces of the French Crown Jewels valued at approximately €88 million. The robbery took place in broad daylight, and lasted less than eight minutes. As of the time of writing, only one of the jewels was recovered, a crown belonging to Napoleon III's wife Eugénie, which the thieves dropped in the street as they fled.

Corporate concerns about entrusting sensitive data to third-party platforms keep many CTOs awake at night. Every time data leaves your infrastructure for a bolted-on BI tool, you're gambling with control. The stakes? Regulatory compliance, competitive advantage, and customer trust. Deploying a business analytics solution while keeping data safe and compliant often involves choosing between BI solutions that are either “bolted-on” or “embedded”.

People feel more confident when their decisions are backed by numbers. That’s just human nature. Add a chart or a metric to a conversation, and suddenly an opinion feels more credible. This is one reason companies invest heavily in analytics tools. They’re not just buying dashboards, they’re buying confidence. Confidence that decisions are grounded in reality, not gut feel. But here’s the problem: having data doesn’t automatically make decisions easier.

Blog Contents hide How many ads will users tolerate before you risk them deleting your app? Your retention strategy shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all. This data story will help for those times when you’ve struggled with churn and trying to grow your product’s usage We are using a music streaming app as an example, but this strategy can apply to any business. The goal of this story is to help you think critically with a data-driven perspective to inform your decision-making process.