Zenlytic and Agentic AI: Unlocking True Self-Service Analytics for Business Users

You’ve probably experienced this: after diving into dashboards, you still can’t get the deeper answers you need. Whether you’re waiting on data teams or exporting to Excel to finish an analysis, self-service analytics in BI and reporting often leaves you stuck in data dead-ends.

What if you could ask complex questions and engage in a discussion about your data in plain language to get immediate, clear insights? What if you could move beyond keeping score about what happened in the past toward more insightful and actionable information? We think agentic AI makes this type of data exploration and analysis feasible today.

In this blog, we will cover:

• Why traditional dashboards are making you inefficient ↵
• What is agentic AI & how does it apply to BI and analytics workflows ↵
• Why Zenlytic is the ideal solution for business-first self-service analytics ↵
• Use Case: How Analytics8 uses Zenlytic to skip the SQL queries & make faster decisions ↵
• Tips to unlock the full potential of agentic AI with Zenlytic ↵

Why Traditional Dashboards Are Making You Inefficient

Dashboards are useful for tracking metrics, but they can’t always answer the deeper questions you have — especially beneath surface level analysis of high-level KPIs. If a filter’s missing from the dashboard or you need a new metric added to give you the right context of information, you end up exporting data to Excel or creating a support ticket and waiting for your data team to create a new report.

This is known as the ‘last-mile problem’ in analytics.

Dashboards are great for measuring the same question structured the same way repeatedly, but they’re not designed for significant or complex “off-road” analysis activities. Real world data insights need answers to questions like:

• Why did this product line have the highest growth this quarter compared to prior periods?
• What led to this growth?
• What can we learn from this and apply to other products?

Traditional BI tools require you to translate those questions into structured queries — often multiple structured queries — before actually analyzing the data to come to a conclusion. This doesn’t feel natural to most people. Even when dashboards allow for interactions like filtering, slicing, and drilling-down, you are still limited to the tool’s rigid design configurations to dig deeper. Most people give up and end up exporting multiple reports to Excel because it’s quicker than figuring out how to navigate a BI tool to the perfect answer.

The result?

• Your data team is overwhelmed with requests for new reports in support of one-off requests or tweaks to existing dashboards, taking time away from strategic, higher-value work.
• Decisions by business users are delayed due to a lack of information, which can mean missing out on opportunities and suffering from extended consequences of inaction.
• Excel workarounds create copies of data ripe with inconsistencies, leading to errors and decisions made on inaccurate and out-of-date data.
• Business users cannot ask higher level questions than just “what happened”. They need answers to questions that will actually help them make strategic decisions.

Dashboards are helpful, but they don’t solve the real challenge of the last mile of self-service analytics. To be truly self-service, you need analytics that responds like a conversation, delivering insights without technical barriers.

What is Agentic AI and How Does It Apply to BI and Analytics Workflows?

Agentic AI applied to your existing business intelligence workflows has the potential to transform how your organization activates data and turns it into actionable intelligence.

It doesn’t just return numbers or static reports — it’s a new approach designed to allow people to ask business questions in plain language and have insightful, real-time answers based on their organization’s data.

Traditional BI forces you to build the perfect dashboard or report, only to end up navigating multiple dashboards—or exporting data to Excel. Agentic AI for BI works differently. It adapts to how you naturally ask questions and think through problems, delivering information in the ways you want to explore, analyze, and strategize about your business. It is designed to be very similar to how a business user would talk to a savvy data analyst in their organization — conversational, context-driven, and self-learning, empowering you to ask open-ended business questions and receive actionable insights immediately.

Here’s how agentic AI for BI changes the way you interact with data:

• Autonomous, on-demand analysis: Agentic AI for BI doesn’t need predefined dashboards or reports to deliver insights. You ask a question in plain-English and in the language of your business, and it autonomously analyzes the data to provide answers without having to wade through a set of reports or dashboards.
• Contextual refinement: Rather than providing a simple answer, agentic AI for BI refines its responses by asking follow-up questions to better understand the context of what problem you’re trying to solve or what question you’re trying to answer. This enables it to continuously improve and deliver more relevant insights, helping you fine-tune the answers as you explore your data.
• Seamless integration across business functions: Whether you’re analyzing sales data, customer behavior, or financial metrics, agentic AI for BI can seamlessly answer questions across multiple business domains. You don’t need to switch between tools or worry about siloed insights — everything is integrated into one system, allowing you to gain a comprehensive understanding of your organization’s data.

Agentic AI for BI removes the technical barriers that inhibit and slow-down decision-making, providing a simple, intuitive experience for end-users that fits seamlessly into your business processes. Rather than spending time navigating around BI tools or munging data in Excel, agentic AI works with you, adapting to your needs and delivering the insights you need to make informed decisions faster.

Why Zenlytic is the Ideal Solution for Business-First, Self-Serve Analytics 

Zenlytic is not just another text-to-SQL AI tool — it’s a comprehensive solution that changes the way your non-technical business users get data-driven insights about your business and your data. Zenlytic combines data from your data warehouse and semantic business meaning of your data to bring insights to business users without the complexity typically associated with traditional BI dashboards and reports.

Here’s what makes Zenlytic truly stand out:

• No barriers between data and insights: Zenlytic takes agentic AI for BI one step further by intelligently combining the power of generative AI with the specifically governed and well-defined insights in your data warehouse, allowing you to get actionable insights by simply asking business questions across all your data without the need to switch between dashboards or relying on multiple tools to get answers to questions. This unified approach eliminates data silos and completes the last mile of self-serve analytics that far too often ends in Excel when just using traditional BI tools.
• Adaptable to your business language: Zenlytic understands your business questions in the eccentricities of the language of your particular organization, making the AI more accessible to non-technical users. Whether you’re asking about sales trends, customer churn, or revenue forecasting, Zenlytic adapts to the business context, asks for clarity when there’s ambiguity in definitions for metrics like “sales” or “revenue”, and provide clear insights that are easy to act on.
• End-to-end visibility: While agentic AI for BI for other tools provides context and insights with text-to-SQL generation, Zenlytic ensures better accuracy and complete governance of your data by leveraging a well-defined semantic layer to generate queries, making the results trustworthy, repeatable, and clearly understandable to your end-users. You’re no longer relying on “black-box” answers. You can trust and validate the insights for accuracy and clarity.

Zenlytic enables business users to explore data intuitively, ask follow-up questions, and drill into insights without relying on technical queries. Graphic Credit: Zynletic

Zenlytic doesn’t require you to become an expert in SQL or learn a new BI tool to create dashboards and reports. Instead, it empowers business users to take control of their data by interacting naturally with it in the language of their business. The combination of generative AI, a powerful semantic layer, and direct data warehouse integration makes Zenlytic an invaluable tool for decision-makers who need faster, more reliable insights without the technical roadblocks that exist in the traditional BI and analytics workflow today.

Use Case: How Analytics8 Uses Zenlytic to Skip the SQL Queries and Make Faster Decisions 

At Analytics8, we understand the challenges business users face with traditional self-service analytics. While we rely on dashboards to track key metrics, we still often find ourselves needing to build custom reports, queries, or manual exports to Excel to answer deeper questions.

By implementing Zenlytic’s agentic AI, we’ve streamlined how we explore and analyze our own data. Instead of solely relying on static dashboards or writing complex SQL queries for one-off questions, our sales and consulting leaders now ask business-first questions and get instant, explainable answers.

Here’s how Zenlytic has helped our team:

• Quick financial analysis: Our consulting directors can compare revenue performance across time periods and business units without needing to manually export data or create new reports.
• Diagnosing business changes: When a metric shifts, we can quickly identify why it changed, not just that it did. This allows us to stay ahead of trends and make proactive decisions.
• Reducing dependence on data analysts: We’ve reduced the need for one-off requests to our data team, freeing them up for more strategic work.
• Strategic planning: Our sales leaders use Zenlytic to develop strategic go-to-market plans.

Zenlytic has made our analytics workflow faster, more intuitive, and less reliant on technical expertise to answer one-off, self-service business questions. It allows us to focus on making decisions rather than spending time on data preparation and manual analysis.

Tips to Unlock the Full Potential of Agentic AI with Zenlytic 

Adopting agentic AI is a strategic move that can greatly improve how your team interacts with data.

To get started, follow these steps to ensure a smooth transition and unlock the full potential of these tools:

1. Ensure your data is clean and well-governed: Zenlytic works best when it can pull from a consistent, organized data source. This means establishing solid data governance practices and ensuring your data is curated and accurate. You don’t have to be perfect to get started but know that agentic AI for BI will uncover opportunities to improve your data quality.
2. Define key business metrics: The more clearly your organization defines metrics and business terms (such as “revenue” or “customers”), the better Zenlytic can deliver insights accurately and guide end-users to answer with the exact insight they are looking for.
3. Start small with focused use cases: Don’t try to overhaul your entire analytics system at once. Focus on a high impact use case, like improving financial reporting or customer insights. Start small, refine, and then scale. At Analytics8, we started with just one high-impact table to start our Zenlytic adoption journey.
4. Drive adoption with real-world use: For business users to fully embrace Zenlytic, they need to see its value firsthand. Demonstrating how the tool can answer complex business questions — like identifying why revenue changed or optimizing marketing spend — will build trust and increase adoption.

Zenlytic and agentic AI for BI help you move from reactive reporting to proactive decision-making. With these tools, your team will not only access insights faster but also be empowered to act on them with confidence.