Speak to your data: from “one day I’ll have data” to data in one day
Everyone wants to chat with their data
Most BI tools now come with a chat box, and most executives have seen the demo where someone types a question and a chart appears a few seconds later. It’s a good demo. The trouble starts when a team points the same tool at its own data and gets an answer that sounds confident and turns out to be wrong.
Usually the missing piece is context.
In a 2023 benchmark from data.world, GPT-4 answered questions about an enterprise database correctly about 16% of the time when it worked straight off the tables. When the researchers gave it a model of what the data meant, accuracy rose to 54%. dbt Labs makes a similar case for the semantic layer. An AI analyst is only as good as its understanding of your business, and somebody has to give it that understanding.
Why so many businesses are still saying "one day I'll have data"
In most of the South African businesses we work with, each division has its own CRM, its own billing system and its own warehouse. Ask three teams how many active customers you have and you’ll often get three numbers, each correct by its own definition.
So questions end up in a queue. Someone on the data team writes the query, builds the report and sends it back a week later, by which time the person who asked has moved on to something else. The usual fix is to sort out the foundations first, with a discovery project, a data dictionary and a semantic layer, and only then add dashboards or AI. That’s reasonable advice, but it tends to take the better part of a year, and it’s a big part of why so many data strategies are still written in the future tense.
From one day I'll have data, to data in one day
We built Ziggurat to shorten that wait. It does the foundation work that teams usually do by hand, so people can start asking questions much sooner.
Ziggurat connects to your warehouses, billing systems, CRM and other sources, maps the whole estate in a day and builds one governed model across every division. From there it works out what each table and metric means, so “active customer” has one agreed definition, and it keeps that understanding up to date as your data changes. Once that’s in place, anyone can ask a question in plain English and get an answer in minutes, worked out from the governed model.
Zig, Ziggurat’s AI analyst, also keeps going overnight, so there are usually a few insights waiting in the morning. Your data team still reviews and governs what Ziggurat builds. They just spend far less time writing data dictionaries by hand.
Let Your Data Work For You
What changes when anyone can ask
Faster answers are the first thing people notice. Over time, the bigger change tends to be in who asks and how often. When every question means filing a request, people save their questions for the ones they think are worth the wait. When asking is easy, they follow up, and follow up again, and that’s usually how the useful answer turns up.
Data that’s mapped, defined and trusted is also simply worth more. It can be used across the whole business, and in time it can become a product in its own right.
The Bottom Line
getting AI to understand your data used to take most of a year. With Ziggurat it takes a day, and after that your team can simply ask.
At Symbyte we like to say data is the new oil, and the question is whether you’re drilling. So what’s the one question about your business you’d ask your data today, if you knew you’d get a straight answer? If you’ve been waiting months for it, have a look at Ziggurat.
