Business intelligence

Business intelligence, or BI, is the practice of turning company data into dashboards, reports, and charts that people use to track the business. Tools like Tableau, Looker, and Metabase are BI tools.

BI is built around views someone designs ahead of time. That works well for the metrics a company watches every day. It works poorly for the long tail of questions that get asked once, since no one builds a dashboard for those.

How it compares to agentic analytics

Agentic analytics answers the questions BI cannot, the ones asked on the spot. The two are not rivals so much as different jobs, and they share the same semantic layer. For a full breakdown, read agentic analytics vs business intelligence.