Zero to Hero with AI in BI

Last month I saw the amazing new Disney Hercules Musical in London’s West End. This has always been my favorite Disney cartoon, partly because my two youngest kids must have watched the original cartoon a thousand times so I know all the songs.

The live musical version did not disappoint and the Muses who sang the narration of the story in their gospel blues voices were simply sensational.

For those who don’t know the Disney version of the story, Hercules, the son of the King of the Gods, Zeus, and his wife the goddess Hera, is stolen from Mt. Olympus (home of the Gods) by Zeus’s jealous and evil brother, Hades,  and given a potion to make him human. He doesn’t drink it all and he becomes human but retains his God-like strength. Growing up, he is awkward and clumsy as he does not know how to control his strength resulting in nobody wanting him around. He is then trained by a crotchety old satyr (half-man, half-goat) named Phil who supposedly trained other Greek heroes like Achilles. Hercules eventually learns how to harness his strength to save people from monsters and other disasters and is elevated to the status of super hero.

At this point in the story, where Hercules becomes this hero, the Muses burst into one of the best songs of the musical called “Zero to Hero” and the audience goes wild! (Well…wild in an English way as this is a show in London and the British are very well behaved in theaters).

So why am I telling you all this and what has it got to do with AI in BI?

AI has been the hottest thing in new technology this year and we are finally starting to see some real potential when used in conjunction with BI. However, it hasn’t always been that way. For the last few years, as AI has evolved, it has been awkward and clumsy (just like Hercules) and caused more problems than it has solved.

This has caused organizations to be wary of how, where and when they use AI with BI. The BI tools that have included AI as part of their functionality have been limited and not very popular with most customers preferring to use more standardized AI tools, like Open AI and Co-Pilot, outside of BI where the the user sees the AI function as a button outside the dashboard.

However, this approach results in most users not using the AI button or functionality.

With improvements in AI tools along with capabilities in BI tools allowing external integration of third party components that bring technologies like write back and AI, it is now possible to truly integrate AI functionality into BI.

At IBIS 2025 in June,  I showed a demo in my keynote where I started with a Web Intelligence report showing hospital patient satisfaction survey feedback. The report showed charts summarizing answers to questions, an overall score and the list of all the individual patient comments. Using InfoBurst Squirrel, I showed how to create a small application that would use Open AI to analyze the comments from a sentiment perspective (Positive, Negative, Neutral) and summarize these findings.

In addition, the InfoBurst Squirrel app provided the capability to write back the results to a database and retrieve previous months results for comparison. This InfoBurst Squirrel app was then embedded into the Webi report, using the Custom Elements feature in Webi, to replace the Webi report component that was displaying the patient comments. This meant that the Webi query feeding those comments into the Webi report was now feeding the comments into the embedded app which, in turn was doing the AI sentiment analysis and write back – all in Webi!

Here is a link to a 3-minute video showing this capability. Check it out because this clearly is a Zero to Hero moment for AI in BI.

By the way, the same thing can be done embedding InfoBurst Squirrel with AI and Write Back in both PowerBI and Tableau.

I’m excited to see how organizations will use this capability and become Hercules heroes and heroines themselves!