Why Gen BI is the path forward—and how to take the first step.
Business Intelligence (BI) provides the foundation for running your business. Companies have invested heavily to develop dashboards, KPIs, and data platforms—and yet, senior leaders still ask their analysts to “put together a quick slide” when the pressure hits. Dashboards go unseen. Definitions vary. Analysts spend more time formatting PowerPoint decks than surfacing insights.
Why?
Because traditional BI wasn’t built for the way organizations need information to make decisions today. And certainly not for how they’ll need to make decisions tomorrow.
Enter Generative BI—the evolution of BI, powered by AI. But let’s be clear: it’s not a feature. It’s a maturity journey. One that transforms data into proactive, personalized, and ultimately agentic insights that work for your business, not the other way around.
At Blend, we call this path the Gen BI Maturity Curve.
At Blend, we define this evolution through a five-level roadmap called the Gen BI Maturity Curve. It’s designed to help organizations understand where they are today, and what it will take to reach a future where AI doesn’t just enhance BI—it operationalizes it.
Each level in the curve reflects a measurable leap in value and complexity:
This is not a one-size-fits-all framework. Organizations move through these levels at their own pace, often with different business units at different stages. But one truth holds across the board:
You can’t leap to Level 5 if you haven’t laid the foundations at Levels 1-2.
With that in mind, let’s walk through each level in detail.
The lowest-hanging fruit? Freeing your analysts from “work about work.”
Today, many business teams spend hours—sometimes days—manually assembling recurring reports in Excel, Tableau, or PowerPoint. With Gen BI, we automate that output. Reports that once took five days now take five minutes. The insights are accurate, refreshed, and beautifully formatted for consumption.
This stage doesn’t just save time—it unlocks it.
What happened last week? What’s trending today? What do I need to know now?
Instead of clicking through a dozen dashboards, Gen BI enables a personalized metrics page with natural language querying—users can ask plain-English questions like, “Why did Northeast sales drop last week?” and get an instant, visual answer. Blend teams are already deploying this inside Microsoft Teams, Slack, and BI platforms like Tableau, Power BI, and ThoughtSpot.
As Srinivas Raghavan, Head of Business Intelligence put it in a recent SME session: “If I have to open a dashboard to find an answer, you’ve already lost me.”
Here’s where the game changes. Gen BI starts moving from descriptive to diagnostic—analyzing variances, detecting anomalies, and surfacing root causes before you even know what to ask. This is where the power of Agentic can be seen, Gen BI is already working for the senior executive to show what happened and the why at the same time.
For decision-makers, this is transformative. No more chasing analysts. No more fragmented “insight hunting.” Just clear, proactive answers to the real question: Why is this happening?
Forecasts. Simulations. Predictive Models. One of the questions a senior leader is likely to have is “what can we expect if the trend continues?”. Gen BI can model what’s likely to happen next—and how it could change depending on your decisions. In one prototype, Blend simulated gross margin impacts across multiple levers, illustrating to leadership exactly where things could go and why to enable a business unit to preemptively adapt their strategy.
"Here is where the insights of GenBI meets the power of Generative AI for rapidly creating data science models and predictive algorithms. Those models can now be directly created on BI platforms" Steven Tom shared. By combining the two, analytics teams accelerate the model creation, iteration, and optimization process.
At the highest maturity level, Gen BI becomes your decision co-pilot. Not only does it analyze and explain, it can also take action—triggering alerts, recommending next steps, or even automating certain responses.
This isn’t sci-fi. It’s already emerging in high-performance organizations where AI agents are adjusting campaigns, flagging outliers, or managing supply issues—all in real time.
Most companies think they’re at Level 3. When in reality, they’re at Level 1.
The gap between ambition and capability is real. That’s why a roadmap like this matters. It helps organizations self-assess, avoid costly missteps, and build a Gen BI capability that’s both technically sound and human-centric.
And perhaps most importantly: it helps you ask better questions—of your data, your KPIs, and your assumptions.
As Mike Mischel, Head of AI Consulting put it: “You think this is your KPI, but it’s not actually driving your outcomes.” Gen BI gives you the power to test that assumption, to run coefficient analyses, and to redefine success based on actual results—not dashboard dogma.
Gen BI succeeds when it meets users where they expect to find it. That means:
The future of BI isn’t just conversational—it’s contextual, personalized, and proactive.
Whether you’re buried in dashboards or experimenting with AI copilots, Gen BI isn’t a destination—it’s a journey. And Blend is ready to walk it with you. Your BI stack is running your business. Blend can help you get more out of it, step by step.
Because when your BI stops just showing you what happened—and starts guiding what to do next—you stop working for BI and have BI work for you …
…and start making decision-driven data.
Want to find out where your organization sits on the Gen BI Maturity Curve?
Let’s talk. We’ll walk you through a self-assessment and explore where the biggest value unlocks lie for your team.
Why Gen BI is the path forward—and how to take the first step.
Business Intelligence (BI) provides the foundation for running your business. Companies have invested heavily to develop dashboards, KPIs, and data platforms—and yet, senior leaders still ask their analysts to “put together a quick slide” when the pressure hits. Dashboards go unseen. Definitions vary. Analysts spend more time formatting PowerPoint decks than surfacing insights.
Why?
Because traditional BI wasn’t built for the way organizations need information to make decisions today. And certainly not for how they’ll need to make decisions tomorrow.
Enter Generative BI—the evolution of BI, powered by AI. But let’s be clear: it’s not a feature. It’s a maturity journey. One that transforms data into proactive, personalized, and ultimately agentic insights that work for your business, not the other way around.
At Blend, we call this path the Gen BI Maturity Curve.
At Blend, we define this evolution through a five-level roadmap called the Gen BI Maturity Curve. It’s designed to help organizations understand where they are today, and what it will take to reach a future where AI doesn’t just enhance BI—it operationalizes it.
Each level in the curve reflects a measurable leap in value and complexity:
This is not a one-size-fits-all framework. Organizations move through these levels at their own pace, often with different business units at different stages. But one truth holds across the board:
You can’t leap to Level 5 if you haven’t laid the foundations at Levels 1-2.
With that in mind, let’s walk through each level in detail.
The lowest-hanging fruit? Freeing your analysts from “work about work.”
Today, many business teams spend hours—sometimes days—manually assembling recurring reports in Excel, Tableau, or PowerPoint. With Gen BI, we automate that output. Reports that once took five days now take five minutes. The insights are accurate, refreshed, and beautifully formatted for consumption.
This stage doesn’t just save time—it unlocks it.
What happened last week? What’s trending today? What do I need to know now?
Instead of clicking through a dozen dashboards, Gen BI enables a personalized metrics page with natural language querying—users can ask plain-English questions like, “Why did Northeast sales drop last week?” and get an instant, visual answer. Blend teams are already deploying this inside Microsoft Teams, Slack, and BI platforms like Tableau, Power BI, and ThoughtSpot.
As Srinivas Raghavan, Head of Business Intelligence put it in a recent SME session: “If I have to open a dashboard to find an answer, you’ve already lost me.”
Here’s where the game changes. Gen BI starts moving from descriptive to diagnostic—analyzing variances, detecting anomalies, and surfacing root causes before you even know what to ask. This is where the power of Agentic can be seen, Gen BI is already working for the senior executive to show what happened and the why at the same time.
For decision-makers, this is transformative. No more chasing analysts. No more fragmented “insight hunting.” Just clear, proactive answers to the real question: Why is this happening?
Forecasts. Simulations. Predictive Models. One of the questions a senior leader is likely to have is “what can we expect if the trend continues?”. Gen BI can model what’s likely to happen next—and how it could change depending on your decisions. In one prototype, Blend simulated gross margin impacts across multiple levers, illustrating to leadership exactly where things could go and why to enable a business unit to preemptively adapt their strategy.
"Here is where the insights of GenBI meets the power of Generative AI for rapidly creating data science models and predictive algorithms. Those models can now be directly created on BI platforms" Steven Tom shared. By combining the two, analytics teams accelerate the model creation, iteration, and optimization process.
At the highest maturity level, Gen BI becomes your decision co-pilot. Not only does it analyze and explain, it can also take action—triggering alerts, recommending next steps, or even automating certain responses.
This isn’t sci-fi. It’s already emerging in high-performance organizations where AI agents are adjusting campaigns, flagging outliers, or managing supply issues—all in real time.
Most companies think they’re at Level 3. When in reality, they’re at Level 1.
The gap between ambition and capability is real. That’s why a roadmap like this matters. It helps organizations self-assess, avoid costly missteps, and build a Gen BI capability that’s both technically sound and human-centric.
And perhaps most importantly: it helps you ask better questions—of your data, your KPIs, and your assumptions.
As Mike Mischel, Head of AI Consulting put it: “You think this is your KPI, but it’s not actually driving your outcomes.” Gen BI gives you the power to test that assumption, to run coefficient analyses, and to redefine success based on actual results—not dashboard dogma.
Gen BI succeeds when it meets users where they expect to find it. That means:
The future of BI isn’t just conversational—it’s contextual, personalized, and proactive.
Whether you’re buried in dashboards or experimenting with AI copilots, Gen BI isn’t a destination—it’s a journey. And Blend is ready to walk it with you. Your BI stack is running your business. Blend can help you get more out of it, step by step.
Because when your BI stops just showing you what happened—and starts guiding what to do next—you stop working for BI and have BI work for you …
…and start making decision-driven data.
Want to find out where your organization sits on the Gen BI Maturity Curve?
Let’s talk. We’ll walk you through a self-assessment and explore where the biggest value unlocks lie for your team.
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