Each day, AI is crowning new winners and losers. One of these shifts is playing out in the Business Intelligence world, a massive, slow-moving industry ripe for disruption. I wrote before that AI would replace BI, and that is becoming increasingly true with each passing day.
Why?
Simply put, BI is one of those older technologies whose time has come. It has only itself to blame. Its entire operating model is slow, static, and old-fashioned. In contrast, AI is dynamic, conversational, and fast-moving. At its heart, this is a matter of speed and business needs overcoming an older business model. Businesses are moving in real-time, and questions change faster than dashboards can be built. Leaders need answers, not a long, unresolved chain of ticket queues.
Given this, the choice between AI and BI isn’t even really a choice at all. BI’s disruption is inevitable, and each day we see more evidence that the old BI model is breaking down. Like all technological shifts, this means disruption with older technologies being surpassed by newer ones.
The statistics speak for themselves.
Which leads me to ask, what’s next? How are enterprises getting there, and how quickly are they going? The answer is interesting.
What’s speeding this disruption up and slowing it down?
At this point, I take it as a given that BI dashboards will steadily be replaced with interactive AI interfaces. Which leads to the next question. What is standing in the way of this disruption happening even faster at individual enterprises?
To answer this, you have to look at what AI needs to succeed. Let’s ask three questions to unpack that.
- What’s the biggest bottleneck facing AI success today?
- What’s really blocking true enterprise intelligence from taking shape at scale in production environments?
- And what is standing between leaders and leveraging the power of AI in their day-to-day workflows?
This is all about getting from aspiration to production, without hitting any roadblocks in between.
Successful AI disruption is built on context, and context requires access
The answer to these questions is important. They determine who will win and who will lose in the AI space. We might think it’s all down to the models. After all, every day we hear about new models and the power that they unlock. Or maybe we think of the hardware needed to drive the raw compute power and the physical constraints found there. But there’s something else, more fundamental, that’s blocking AI.
One word. Context.
Without it, AI isn’t able to live up to its promise, and that means that solving the context problem is quickly emerging as one of the most critical arenas in the AI race.
How do you reach the enterprise context layer?
Context isn’t new, nor is this the first time I’ve spoken about it. But the need for context also isn’t going away. In fact, it’s steadily growing with each passing day. For AI, context is everything. I’ve said before that AI is only as good as the data that feeds it, and that’s true. This need is creating a kind of race–you might call it the race for context. And those able to find the context that their AI needs will be able to leverage the power of that AI faster and more effectively. Those who can’t will fall behind
Where do you find the context that AI needs?
But where is your context? That’s the problem. Context isn’t easily located. It is, after all, contextual, which means that it’s buried deep inside the processes, operations, and datasources of every organization. This makes context not only hard to locate, hard to isolate, and even harder still to access.
All of this leads to one question. What do we need to access context in an enterprise setting? What do we need to unlock enterprise intelligence at the platform level? And what will be the implications of this race?
Why Starburst is turning the BI world on its head due to access to context.
In this area, the area of accessing context, Starburst has something innovative. We can find, access, and connect the content that AI needs in a way that no one else can.
How?
The answer comes in two parts, one that’s been with us from the start, and one entirely new.
Together, we’re using this approach to upend the world of BI. Those able to leverage a data foundation capable of accessing context, using tools like ours, will be able to succeed. This is the opportunity that drives us forward, and it’s a fundamental expansion of Starburst’s mission, away from merely the data foundations, towards what’s built on top of those foundations.
How the Starburst Enterprise Intelligence Platform accesses the context needed by AI
Let’s start with the Starburst Enterprise Intelligence Platform. In the race for context, you need an architecture that’s built on access. That’s exactly what Starburst has always been. Our federated architecture is built around the idea that you don’t need to migrate all of your data to a single source of truth. You can access it universally, creating–what I have always called–optionality, the freedom to choose where your data lives and the technologies that control it.
The three pillars of the Starburst Enterprise Intelligence Platform
We deliver AI readiness without requiring you to rebuild your data stack. We do this through a unified enterprise intelligence architecture built on three distinct layers.
Analytics Engine
First, the Analytics Engine. Built on Trino, this is the high-performance heart of the platform. It provides federated data access, which allows you to query data where it lives on premises, in the cloud, or across hybrid environments. This turns a fragmented data architecture into a scalable access layer.
Enterprise Context Layer
Second, we have the Enterprise Context Layer. This is where raw data becomes ground truth. This layer applies common definitions, policies, and metadata across your domains. It turns raw tables into curated Data Products that both humans and AI can actually understand and trust.
Agentic Control Plane
Third, we have the Agentic Control Plane. AI needs more than just data. It needs governance. This plane coordinates AI agents and workflows while enforcing policy and setting guardrails for AI-driven actions. It ensures that when an AI interacts with your data, it stays within the bounds of your corporate reality.
How AIDA uses the Starburst Enterprise Intelligence Platform to directly disrupt BI
This is when things get exciting. We’ve looked at the engine that makes accessing context possible, and we know that this will lead to AI adoption, acceleration, and success. But what can you do with that, and what does it look like in practice?
The answer is AIDA, and it’s changing the way that leaders access data forever.
AIDA puts the power of context in your hands
AIDA is the ultimate expression of optionality, a powerful, conversational data assistant that leverages the power of the Starburst data foundation to access the context needed by AI. With AIDA, you can ask natural language questions about datasets that allow you to draw from context across your business. Because it’s powered by Starburst, it has universal access to the context that AIDA needs to be accurate, relevant, and impactful.
Have a look at this demo to see AIDA in action.
What AIDA means for BI
For BI, AIDA is a fatal blow. Compared to the static, slow-moving dashboards of the past, AIDA is dynamic, conversational, and adaptive. It lets you probe a problem, follow a train of thought, and delve deeply. These are all of the same outcomes that BI hopes for, but at a pace, depth, and level that’s far above any BI tool.
Here, we’re moving away from the era of periodic reporting and into the era of continuous decision support.
What AIDA means for leaders
It puts power in your hands directly, and in this sense, it’s the ultimate expression of the Starburst belief in the democratization of data. AIDA is built to empower leaders and bring insights directly to them quickly and without delay. This allows another aspect of choice. You choose how to access insights derived from your business context; you choose how you want to question your data, wherever it lives.
From one leader to another, this is powerful stuff. This is how you escape the reporting trap and start running your business at the speed of AI.
AI will disrupt BI sooner or later, the only question is how quickly
AI’s disruption of BI is inevitable. It is simply too fast, too dynamic, and too valuable in comparison to its static, slow-moving predecessor. Many will not mourn BI’s passing. But not every organization will have the tools to adopt this replacement quickly. That approach requires context, and as we’ve seen, context is not always easy to access in the way that AI needs.
Enterprise intelligence, built on the data foundations that power AIDA
This is where Starburst’s Enterprise Intelligence Platform and AIDA have a unique role to play. For years, we have built the best data foundation available in an enterprise setting. Data federation assures that we have what it takes to find context wherever it lives. Further, we have what it takes to govern that data, making sense of it.
And now, with AIDA, we have the ability to serve insights from that context in a way that is easy, intuitive, and powerful.
The data revolution rolls onwards, disrupting BI at speed
Taking all of these things together is nothing short of revolutionary. And this is our mission. We will bring accelerated AI disruption of the BI industry to every single corner of the business world, and we will do it on the strengths that have always made Starburst powerful, our analytics engine, our strong commitment to performance, governance, and access, and our belief that interoperability and optionality are powerful tools in the hands of organizations wishing to drive real change at speed.
Simply put, Starburst is positioned to be the tool in the AI context race, driving forward BI disruption at a scale that cannot be matched.
Learn more about AIDA
Want to know more about AIDA? Check out my recent webinar launch of AIDA “From Dashboards to AI Decisions: Rethinking Enterprise Intelligence.”
