Chat with your business data - Conversational Analytics comes to Gemini in Looker

Generative AI has invigorated the promise of self-service analytics, which, when combined with enterprise-scale security and governance, and backed by trusted metrics, can prevent data chaos and empower you to quickly understand and act on your data insights.

Looker is playing a key role in this data revolution, evolving business intelligence (BI) for the AI era by bringing the power of trusted insights to everyone in your organization, and reducing technical barriers to information that have slowed collaboration and discovery. Our semantic model enables complex data to be simplified with predefined business metrics – a prerequisite for grounding gen AI in the enterprise, transforming data into measures you can rely on.

Today, we take a big step forward in this transformation journey by delivering on our promise to bring intelligent AI-powered BI to everyone, making Conversational Analytics available in preview to customers as part of Gemini in Looker.

Conversational Analytics, our first Looker data agent, empowers users to ask questions of their data in natural language and take informed actions based on the insights they receive, all powered by AI, grounded in truth thanks to Looker’s semantic layer. Customers no longer need to be technical experts to gain value from business intelligence, but can now simply choose the data to ask questions about and do so, as simply as they would ask a colleague, significantly improving ease of use and lowering barriers to discovery.

Conversational Analytics, thanks to Google AI as part of Gemini in Looker, will empower data analysts to take advantage of easy access to data, with no code visualization and report generation to more rapidly discover and display answers for informed collaboration. Additionally, they can dive deeper into queries, given their domain knowledge, and further inspect the results for laser-focused accuracy.

In addition to Looker's semantic model, Conversational Analytics connects seamlessly to BigQuery and Google Sheets, allowing you to directly ask questions of your data stored in these locations and get instant, visual answers. You can then take any chart or visualization created with Conversational Analytics and explore it further in Looker Studio to create and share new dashboards or reports.

The promise of true conversational analytics across your organization is fully delivered with an agile semantic layer, like that from Looker, and the ability to connect all your data to AI, with built-in governance to ensure the right people have access to the right data, integrated with the tools and workflows your company relies on every day.When customers aren’t confined to pre-built dashboards or complex SQL queries, your entire company, including business and analyst teams, can chat with your data and obtain insights in seconds, fully enabling data-driven decision-making. Built on a foundation of LookML and enhanced by Gemini’s AI capabilities, Conversational Analytics provides quick answers, enables deeper exploration through follow-up questions, and offers AI-powered recommendations for confident, data-driven action.

Going beyond insights: Empowering the entire workforce

Conversational Analytics is not just an answers engine, it’s also an accelerant for you to take data-driven action directly from Looker Studio, integrating insights and actions to help teams respond to opportunities and challenges quickly and effectively. Conversational Analytics is designed explicitly for the way your organization operates, featuring the option to handle multi-turn follow-on questions to your data, with results featuring embedded explanations, and out-of-the-box connections for export to Looker Studio reports.

Looker is designed to establish a single source of truth for your data, providing consistent metrics across your organization. And now with Conversational Analytics, Looker understands the intent behind the question, can generate the appropriate query, and displays the results in an easy-to-understand visualization. This not only saves time, but also opens up data exploration to a broader audience within your organization.

By making data insights accessible to everyone, regardless of their technical expertise, we believe this feature will unlock new levels of innovation and productivity for businesses of all sizes. We also anticipate Conversational Analytics will significantly empower self-service data exploration, leading to faster insights and improved data literacy, setting forth greater opportunity for informed collaboration and streamlined workflows.

We're excited to see how you use Conversational Analytics to transform your organization. As always, we welcome your feedback and look forward to continuing to push the boundaries of what's possible with data.

To get started with Conversational Analytics, your administrator needs to enable Gemini in Looker. You can also register today to learn more about our AI and business intelligence innovations on September 24th at our Gemini at Work event, and see how organizations like yours are harnessing Google's generative AI to drive innovation and achieve measurable results.