We are at a pivotal moment for business intelligence (BI). There’s more data than ever impacting all aspects of business. Organizations are faced with increasing user demands for that data, with a wide range of access requirements. Then there’s AI, which is radically transforming how you create and think about every project. The delivery and adoption of generative AI is poised to bring the full benefits of BI to users who find a conversational experience more appealing than traditional methods. This week at Google Cloud Next, we introduced Conversational Analytics as part of Gemini in Looker, rethinking how we bring easy access of insights to our users, transforming the way we engage with our data in BI, using natural language. In addition, we announced the preview of an array of capabilities for Looker that leverage Google’s work in generative AI and speed up your organization’s ability to dive deeper into the data that matters most, so you can rapidly create and share insights.
With Gemini in Looker, your relationship with your data and reporting goes from a slow-moving and high-friction process, limited by gatekeepers, to a collaborative and intelligent conversation – powered by AI. The deep integration of Gemini models in Looker brings insights to the major user flows that power your business, and establishes a single source of truth for your data with consistent metrics.
Conversational Analytics brings your data to life
Conversational Analytics is a dedicated space in Looker for you to chat with and engage with your business data, as simply as you would ask a colleague a question on chat. In combination with LookML semantic models available from Looker, we establish a single source of truth for your data, providing consistent metrics across your organization. Now, your entire company, including business and analyst teams, can chat with your data and obtain insights in seconds, fully enabling your data-driven decision-making culture.
You can leverage Conversational Analytics, using Gemini in Looker, to find top products, sales details, and dive deeper into the answers with follow-up questions.
With Conversational Analytics, everyone can uncover patterns and trends in data, as if you were speaking to your in-house data expert – and while the answers come in seconds, Looker shows you the data behind the insights, so you know the foundation is accurate and the method is true.
Smart and simple modeling on a trusted foundation
In the generative AI era, ensuring data authenticity and standardizing operational metrics is more than a nice to have – it’s critical, ensuring measures and comparisons across apps and teams are reliable and consistent. Looker’s semantic layer is at the heart of our modeling capabilities, powering the centrally defined metrics and data relationships that mean truth and accuracy as you go through your workflows. With LookML, your analysts can work together seamlessly to create universal data and metrics definitions.
Gemini in Looker features LookML Assistant, which we hope will enable everyone to leverage and improve the power of their semantic models quickly using natural language. Simply tell Gemini in Looker what you are looking to build, and the LookML code will be automatically created for you, setting the stage for governed data, powered by generative AI, easier than ever before.
Expanding intelligence for all Looker customers — and beyond
As the world of BI has evolved, so have our customers’ needs. They demand powerful and complete BI tools that are intuitive to use, with self-service exploration, seamless ad-hoc analysis, and high-quality visualizations all in a single platform, augmented by generative AI.
We are now offering Looker Studio Pro to licensed Looker users (excluding Embed), at no additional cost, making getting started with BI easier than ever.
Our vision is that Looker is the single source of truth for both modeled data and metrics that can be consumed anywhere — in our products, through partner BI tools or through our open SQL APIs. Looker’s modeling layer provides a single place to curate and govern the metrics most important to your business, meaning that customers can see consistent results no matter where they interact with their data.
Thanks to deep integration with Google Workspace, you can ask questions of your data with Gemini in Looker, helping you create reports easily and bring your creations to Slides.
Traditionally, BI tools take a user out of the flow of their work. We believe we can improve on this, helping users collaborate on their data where they are. With this in mind, we have extended our connections to Google Workspace, with the goal of meeting users where they are, across Slides, Sheets and Chat. Users will be able to automatically create Looker Studio reports from Google Sheets, helping you rapidly visualize and share insights on your data, while Slide Generation from Gemini in Looker eliminates that blank deck start, starting with your visuals and reports, and building AI-generated summaries to kick off your presentation right.
Business data insights as easy as asking Google
Gemini in Looker offers an array of new capabilities to help speed up and make analytics tasks and workflows including data modeling, chart creation, slide presentation generation and more even easier. As Google has done for decades in applications like Chrome, Gmail, and Google Maps, Gemini in Looker offers a customer experience that is intuitive and efficient.Conversational Analytics in Looker and LookML Assistant are joined by a set of capabilities that we first showcased at Next 2023, namely:
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Report generation: Build an entire report, including multiple visualizations, a title, theme and layout, in seconds, by providing a one- two-sentence prompt. Gemini in Looker is an AI analyst that can create entire reports, giving you a starting point that you can adjust by using natural language.
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Advanced visualization assistant: Customize your visualizations using natural language. Gemini in Looker helps create JSON code configs, which you can modify as necessary, and generate a custom visualization.
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Automatic slide generation: Create impactful presentations with insightful text summaries of your data. Gemini in Looker automatically exports a report into Google Slides, with text narratives that explains the data in charts and highlights key insights.
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Formula assistant: Create calculated fields on-the-fly to extend and transform the information flowing from your data sources. Gemini in Looker removes the need for you to remember complicated formulas, and creates your formula for you, for ad-hoc analysis.
Each of these capabilities are now available in preview.
Reliable intelligence for the generative AI era
Looker plays a critical role in Google Cloud’s intelligence platform, unifying your data ecosystem. Bringing even more intelligence into Looker with Gemini makes it easier for our customers to understand and access their business data for analysts to create dashboards and reports, and for developers to build new semantic models. Join us as we create new experiences with data and analytics — one defined by AI-powered conversational interfaces for data and analytics. It all starts with a simple chat box.