Next-Generation Business Intelligence Platforms

The KuppingerCole Market Compass surveys the evolving market for next-generation business intelligence (BI) platforms, distinguishing them from traditional BI by their self-service orientation, AI/ML-augmented analytics, and growing ability to connect insights directly to action through embedded workflows or embedded dashboards in enterprise applications. The report argues that while BI remains essential for digital organizations, data preparation and data management are becoming the critical foundation for BI, AI/ML programs, data governance, and data privacy initiatives. As organizations generate exponentially more first-party data and gain easier access to scalable cloud computing and storage, next-generation BI tools are positioned to handle higher data volumes, automate preparation steps, and support governance and privacy controls alongside analysis.

AI/ML capabilities commonly span supervised and unsupervised techniques for clustering, classification, anomaly detection, regression forecasting, recommendations, and natural language processing. These capabilities are applied not only to insight generation and visualization selection, but also to data management tasks such as column similarity detection, entity extraction, and translating regulations into data policies. The market direction emphasizes democratized access: licensing and usability improvements allow many more employees to consume dashboards, receive alerts on KPI deviations, and explore root causes, shifting BI from specialist authorship to broad organizational decision support.

Core platform expectations include analytics, visualization, reporting, data preparation, automation, governance, and strong data protection, with capability priority varying by use case (de-siloed insights, embedded analytics, scalable BI, augmented analytics, and reporting). Vendor highlights include Zoho for innovation, Microsoft Power BI for functionality, Tableau for visualizations, and Dataiku for data preparation, with comparative ratings provided across security, interoperability, usability, deployment, and market standing for major platforms.

• Next-generation BI platforms increasingly use AI/ML for data preparation, insight generation, and natural language interaction.
• Traditional BI solutions are described as having reached their peak, while next-generation BI platforms are expected to continue developing and maturing beyond 2025.
• Next-generation BI platforms typically operate on cloud or hybrid deployment models.
• Inclusion criteria require accessible insights, dashboarding, integrations, embeddability, automation and/or AI/ML, and strong security and privacy protections.
• Exclusion criteria remove vendors that are not future-oriented, are prototypes, or have low maturity that limits functionality or successful implementations.
• Zoho is rated Outstanding in Innovation.
• Microsoft Power BI is rated Outstanding in Functionality.
• Tableau is rated Outstanding in Visualizations.
• Dataiku is rated Outstanding in Data Preparation.
• Amazon QuickSight releases new features every two weeks.
• Power BI releases new features every week and releases a new version of Power BI Desktop every month.

• “Next-generation BI platforms will also increasingly enable immediate action when viewing BI dashboards by embedding automated workflows within the platform or embedding dashboards into enterprise applications.”
• “It is quickly being revealed that data preparation and management is the critical capability that manages high-quality datasets for the data-driven organization.”
• “Next-generation BI platforms are the new breed of data management platforms that can handle higher volumes of data, assist in essential data preparation steps, perform tasks with more granular control, and combine data insights with enforcing data privacy and management policy.”
• “Lower costs due to more available computing power, automated support and AutoML, and higher capacity to derive insights from data make it more appealing for enterprises to make BI visualizations and dashboards available for more – and sometimes all – employees.”
• “Today, BI platforms are designed with the reader and decision maker in mind.”
• “We expect to see data preparation and maintenance of high-quality datasets becoming the foundation for multiple workflows that stem from it, including BI, reporting, ML training, data governance, and data privacy exercises.”
• “Integrating automated workflows to react to an insight instantly translates data-driven insight into data-driven decisions.”
• “Superset is an SQL and no code interface.”
• “Cognos aims to be the AI copilot to the enterprise bringing AI and self-service capabilities with planning and analytics for competitive advantage.”
• “Power BI aims to create a data culture so that everyone can make decisions based on data.”