Can people in your company ask the BI tool questions in plain English without coming to you?

Power BI Copilot, Looker with Gemini, Tableau and ThoughtSpot can answer questions like "sales by region last quarter" from trusted data, so simple requests do not need an analyst.

How to automate it

How to automate “export data to Excel for people who want it their way”

Here are 2 ways to spend less time on this, best first. Each comes with steps you can follow today.

20 min

typically, a few times a week

60%

of the time can be automated

Some setup

to set up

Fix 1 of 2

Software featureBest fix

Give spreadsheet users a live connection instead of exports

Connected Sheets, Analyze in Excel, Sigma and Power BI's Excel connection let people work in a spreadsheet on live, governed data, so you stop sending CSVs.

Typically saves about 60% of the time2 h to set up

1Pick the option that fits your stack: Connected Sheets (BigQuery, Snowflake), Analyze in Excel or Power BI live connection, or Sigma.
2Build one governed dataset per common request.
3Show the requesters how to refresh and pivot it themselves.
4Reply to export requests with the link.

Tools: Google Connected Sheets · Excel with Power BI live connection · Sigma · Snowflake or BigQuery connectors

Fix 2 of 2

Software feature

Let people ask the BI tool in plain English instead of asking you

Power BI Copilot, Looker with Gemini, Tableau Pulse and Tableau Agent, ThoughtSpot Spotter, Snowflake Intelligence and Databricks Genie answer plain-English questions from governed data. Simple requests stop reaching the data team.

Typically saves about 35% of the time4 h to set up

1Check which natural-language features your BI or warehouse license includes.
2Point it at one well-modelled, trusted dataset first (for example sales or support), with clear field names and descriptions.
3Add example questions and approved metric definitions so answers match your reports.
4Pilot it with the teams that ask you the most questions; review the questions it answered wrong.
5Reply to simple one-off requests with a link to the tool and an example question.

Tools: Power BI Copilot · Looker with Gemini · Tableau Pulse and Tableau Agent · ThoughtSpot Spotter · Snowflake Intelligence · Databricks AI/BI Genie

Quick wins

Have you tried…

Can people in your company ask the BI tool questions in plain English without coming to you?: Power BI Copilot, Looker with Gemini, Tableau and ThoughtSpot can answer questions like "sales by region last quarter" from trusted data, so simple requests do not need an analyst.

Who does this task

Roles in our library that list this as one of their common tasks. Each guide covers the rest of that role’s week.

Data / BI analyst

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