Most dashboards get built with excitement, then forgotten within weeks. Meanwhile, teams juggle 7+ tools to answer what should be simple questions. One tab for product data, another for BI, a third to Slack someone who might know why metrics dipped. The modern data stack delivers data, but rarely decisions.
The Dashboard Era
Dashboards were once our window into data. But they assumed we always knew what to look for. Over time, they became passive, brittle, and siloed. They showed numbers but not narratives. Visualizations without velocity.
They required humans to notice changes, to dig for causes, to interpret and act. Meanwhile, most data sat idle... until someone had time to ask the right question. Even when questions were asked, the answers often lived in different tools, with different owners, and required stitching together different metrics and definitions.
We've been stuck in that pattern for decades. More charts. More pipelines. More overhead. But not necessarily more clarity.
What Dashboards Can't Do
Even the best dashboards fall short in three critical jobs:
- Anticipate: They react to questions but never raise their own.
- Explain: They show “what” changed, not “why.”
- Experiment: They don't suggest paths forward or test outcomes.
That's not just a limitation: it's a lost opportunity.
Enter the Agents
Picture this: You're in Slack. A message from @Altertable pops up:
Signups dropped 12% week-over-week. This coincides with a homepage experiment launched Tuesday. Mobile load time spiked in the same window. I've prepped the relevant data: want to explore or revert?.
One thread, three layers: insight → context → options.
These agents aren't replacing human curiosity: they're amplifying it. Most analysis starts with routine segmentation, trend-spotting, or correlation checks. Agents handle the grunt work, surfacing what's worth a second look. You decide what's interesting, what's noise, and what's next.
They draft, you decide. Just like in Cursor.
The intent isn't to build a system that “knows the business better than you.” It's to relieve you from low-leverage wrangling, so you can spend more time interpreting patterns and steering outcomes. The agent does the heavy lifting; the human does the heavy thinking.
Life After Dashboards
Post-dashboard, the stack shrinks. So does the babysitting. No more waking up to broken pipelines or stale charts. No more dueling definitions.
Just a shared, live canvas where product, engineering, and ops move in sync.
No more chasing questions or syncing across scattered tools. Just shared context, live updates, and next steps queued up—before the fire drill even begins.
Be Part of the Shift
We're redesigning how teams work with data, moving from scattered dashboards to seamless dialogue. If that resonates, we're welcoming new design partners now.
Shoot us an email at hey@altertable.ai or join the waiting list.
