A debate is rippling through the data and analytics world: BI is dead. That framing misses the point. The more honest version of the argument highlights something most of the industry still doesn’t want to confront. TL;DR BI as a category isn’t dying. What’s fading is the dashboard’s dominance as the main way people interact with data, squeezed at once by cloud data platforms, AI assistants, and low-code / vibe-coding tools. Most BI vendors are simply tacking expensive AI add-ons onto their existing dashboards. That approach collapses as soon as AI inference costs normalize. The dashboard itself is not the real product. The semantic layer, governance, and metric definitions are the true foundations. Per-seat dashboard pricing is structurally out of sync with the consumption-based pricing models that cloud data platforms apply to the same underlying data. The companies that build the trusted infrastructure beneath every interface will own the intelligence layer for the next decade. That’s the bet Databox is making. Introduction: when the analyst bottleneck finally comes into focus A debate has been circulating in the data and analytics community recently. The assertion, made in earnest by practitioners in this space, is that BI is dead—or at least in terminal decline. I don’t buy that. But I do see why people are making the claim. And the more candid version of the argument points to a real shift that most of the industry is still sidestepping. BI isn’t dying, but its monopoly is. Those are very different issues, and they demand very different strategies. The Squeeze Is Real We’ve been building in analytics for more than a decade.…