Analytics and Business Intelligence Trends in Cloud, Embedding, and Generative AI

Executive Summary

The analytics and business intelligence (BI) market is mature in many respects, but it’s rapidly evolving in three important ways: expanding cloud deployment options; adding embedding capabilities to deliver insights within applications and collaboration platforms or as triggers of business workflows; and adding augmented capabilities such as generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to ease analysis, improve understanding, and gain predictive insight. These new demands are being added to core analytics/BI requirements such as highly formatted reporting, data visualization, dashboarding, and data storytelling—as well as to the underpinnings of data prep, cataloging, security, authentication, and auditability. 

This Constellation Research Trend Report explains which analytics/BI capabilities are emerging to satisfy customer demand for cloud deployment options; explores more ways to embed analytics at the point of decision; and outlines ways to exploit next-generation machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, as well as including the very latest in GenAI. This report also includes Constellation’s independent analysis of analytics and BI vendor ThoughtSpot, with an overview and assessment of the company’s strengths, weaknesses, and overall strategy. Early adopters should use this report to better understand trends in the analytics and BI market and ThoughtSpot’s capabilities, including its latest efforts to respond to cloud, embedded, and augmented trends.