Is Conversational AI the New Dashboard?

The Limits of Traditional Dashboards

How do you usually get information about our business? For a long time, the go-to solution has been the Business Intelligence (BI) dashboard. Dashboards are great for showing key numbers and trends visually. When you need to keep an eye on the same important metrics every day, like sales figures or website traffic, dashboards do a fantastic job. They present the information clearly and consistently because someone has already set them up to show exactly what's needed.

But business isn't always about monitoring the same things. New questions pop up all the time. Maybe you have a sudden idea you want to explore, or you notice something interesting and want to dig deeper into the data. 

With traditional dashboards, getting answers to these new questions can take time. You usually have to ask your BI team or an analyst to create a new report or change a dashboard. This process works, but it's not always fast enough when you need quick insights.

Asking Questions Directly with Conversational AI

A helpful alternative is conversational AI. It's an artificial intelligence designed to understand and respond in a way that feels like a natural conversation.

It uses clever technology like natural language processing (NLP) to make sense of everyday language, often powered by advanced AI like Google's foundation models, which enable new generative AI capabilities. You'll find these kinds of tools becoming more common, for example, as part of cloud platforms like Google Cloud's Vertex AI offerings.

Think of conversational AI as having a smart assistant you can chat with about your business data.

Instead of waiting for a report, you can ask questions, like, "Show me our sales per region for the last quarter."

The conversational AI agent understands your question and gives you the answer right away, maybe as a simple list or even a chart within the chat. What's really powerful is that you can keep the conversation going.

If the first answer sparks another question, like  "Which region grew the fastest?" or "Compare this quarter to the same one last year," you can ask it immediately. 

Conversational AI lets you explore your data in a more natural, back-and-forth way, helping you follow your curiosity and find insights faster than digging through static reports.

Exploration vs. Monitoring: Using the Right Tool

Does this mean conversational AI will replace dashboards completely?

Probably not.

They often serve different purposes.

Dashboards are still excellent for that regular, at-a-glance monitoring of core metrics. Conversational AI is better suited for exploring data, asking specific questions, and getting quick answers when you need them.

These tools can also work together.

You might be able to ask your conversational AI assistant to pull up a standard report or a specific chart that usually lives on a dashboard. And AI might even help create dashboards more quickly in the future.

The key is understanding what each tool does best. Dashboards provide the steady overview. Conversational AI gives you the flexibility and speed to explore and ask specific questions. For anyone who needs fast answers or wants to investigate ideas as they arise, conversational AI offers a really useful way to interact with business data more directly.

To see conversational AI in action, join us at the Google Cloud Summit Benelux 2025, where we’ll be showcasing OLAF, our innovative data assistant built on Google Cloud Platform.