Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

A Head of Product at a major sportswear retailer has a brilliant idea: let’s build an app that sales staff on the shop floor can have on their tablets, and ask their questions there and then, where they serve customers. They set about building. In order for the app to answer questions, it needs to have the information from the 2026 Spring/Summer Catalogue, a mammoth manual, let’s say 300k tokens.

I'll be honest: one number from the latest embedded analytics research stopped the entire planning conversation for this webinar. 57% of teams with embedded analytics report no measurable business impact, and that means not low impact or underwhelming impact, but no measurable impact at all.

For years, the "Data-Driven" dream has looked a lot like a crowded screen. We built dashboards for every department, every KPI, and every niche project. But as we reached "peak dashboard," a frustrating reality set in: we were drowning in visualizations but starving for immediate insights.

What an incredible day at the Agentic Analytics Playbook EMEA event! It might have been baking hot outside, but inside the Nobu Hotel, the energy was absolutely electric.

Monthly active user rates stuck at 23%. A Slack message about another client who can't find the data they need. A support ticket your team has started to joke about: “Can you export this to Excel?” Once upon a time, embedding dashboards inside your product was a differentiator. Today, this is what the feedback looks like when your analytics stop working. AI agents can now respond to complex questions with meaningful insights in seconds.

You ask your agent a question. The answer is slightly off. You point out the gap. Spotter fixes it, and that fix doesn't disappear when the session ends. Your team doesn't re-explain the same thing tomorrow. The next analyst doesn't start from scratch. The correction stays, and the work gets better from here. That's what memory makes possible. Not just for you. For everyone who comes after.

I spend my days helping organizations modernize analytics to drive tangible business outcomes and liberate analytics teams from legacy processes. At this year’s Snowflake Summit ’26, I had the pleasure of sitting down with AJ Subbarao, Director of Business Intelligence & AI at Intuitive Surgical (ISRG).

Webinar recap: Andy Cotgreave (co-founder, How to Speak Data) and Francois Lopitaux (SVP of Product, ThoughtSpot) on hallucinations, accountability, and what it actually takes to trust AI with your data.

A CFO asks her AI agent a simple question: "What was our ARR at the end of Q3?" The agent finds the subscriptions table, spots a column called arr, sums it up, and returns $16.4M. Strong quarter. Everyone nods. The real number was $13.9M, but no one in the room knew it yet. I hear some version of this story from nearly every data leader I talk to right now, and it almost always starts the same way. They stand up an AI pilot. It looks sharp in the POC.

At the recent data:unplugged 2026 in Münster, Europe’s biggest festival for data and AI, the stage was set for a masterclass in data transformation. Julian Stock, Analytics Reporting Team Lead, and Andreas Weiß, Senior Reporting Engineer, from PAYBACK, Germany’s premier loyalty program, shared the stage to detail a decade-long evolution: the journey from a strict, ticket-based reporting system to a thriving, AI-ready data culture.