Every BI vendor since then has promised the same thing: "No more exports." No more pasting into Excel. No more copying into slides.
And yet here we are in 2025, after billions invested in R&D of BI tools. Data platforms faster than ever with Snowflake, Databricks and lots of great data engineering tools. Dashboards sleeker than ever too.
Still, most users finish their analysis by pasting into Excel. Then into PowerPoint. And increasingly now, into LLMs. Sometimes into enterprise-grade LLMs provided by their companies (good), but too often into free-to-use models with no guardrails and no data-leak prevention (bad).
Why? It's not just user inertia, though some of that exists too. It's because the tools have never truly met people where decisions happen.
For as long as I can remember, BI platforms tried to lock people in. But decisions don't live inside a dashboard. They live in workflows and meetings and conversations. When BI tools don't provide enough governance, context or flexibility, users have to go elsewhere.
The governance gap
Most BI tools in the market still demand a mature governance process to succeed. That process takes years in the best of times, assuming staff turnover is very low. Reality is not always that ideal. Most organisations never fully get there. Adoption stalls. Definitions drift. Trust fractures while complexity grows. And the "last mile" of decision-making remains outside the tool.
What LLMs are changing (hopefully by 2027)
They promise analytics that are conversational, contextual and trustworthy (million-dollar word). Instead of clicking through filters, you'll just ask "Why did Q4 miss plan?" and get a narrative, drivers and recommendations with close to zero hallucination. Disclaimer: in 2025, most of this is still pre-production. Demos are not reality.
The trust layer pattern
The winners in BI won't be those who keep churning out prettier dashboards. They'll be the vendors who reduce organisational friction. Who help companies build governance faster and make context native. Who make staying inside the platform easier than leaving.
- BI vendors: do not blame users for pasting. Build systems they don't want to leave. Hint: most real pain points are much more down-to-earth than the shiny objects shipped with every new release.
- Business users: ask yourself whether there is a better way than pasting into Excel or PowerPoint. And if you must paste, at least leave a breadcrumb: the link to the source report and the business owner of the numbers.
First posted on LinkedIn. This is the canonical copy, lightly tidied.