Whether you call it self-service analytics or self-service business intelligence (BI), there has been much discussion about the perils, myths, promises, and prospects of successfully building self-service capability. Going forward, I’ll use the phrase “self-service BI” but you are welcome to substitute the words “self-service analytics”. So, is self-service BI actually attainable or just snake oil?

Today we’re excited to announce ThoughtSpot Sage, our new search experience that combines the power of GPT’s natural language processing and generative AI capabilities with the accuracy and security of our patented self-service analytics platform. With this new integration, data teams will be able to exponentially increase their impact across an organization as business users self-serve personalized, actionable, and trustworthy insights like never before.

When I was working at Google back in the mid 2000’s, we dealt with tens of billions of ad impressions a day, trained several machine learning models on years worth of historic data, and used frequently-updated models in ranking ads. The whole system was an amazing feat of engineering and there was no system out there that was even close to handling this much data. It took us years and hundreds of engineers to make this happen, today, the same scale can be achieved in any enterprise.

A little over a year ago, I found myself feeling stuck in my role as a data engineer. I had majored in business in college and was looking to connect more with that side of things. I enjoyed my tasks as a data engineer but I wanted more flexibility and creativity. I wanted to be involved in business decisions rather than my tasks already being decided for me.