GCP – Talk with and trust your data using Looker’s Conversational Analytics, now GA

In a world of increasing data volume and demand, businesses are looking to make faster decisions and separate insight from noise. Today, we’re bringing Conversational Analytics to general availability in Looker, delivering natural language queries to everyone in your organization, removing BI bottlenecks. With Conversational Analytics, we’re transforming the way you get answers, cutting through stale dashboards and accelerating data discovery. Our goal: make analytics and AI as easy and scalable as performing a Google search, extending BI to the broader enterprise as you go from prompt to full data exploration in seconds.

We announced the preview of Conversational Analytics at Google Cloud Next in April. Since then, we’ve also extended the ability to leverage Google’s latest Gemini models with your own custom applications through the Conversational Analytics API, showcased productivity improvements that come from the convergence of AI and BI, and empowered today’s modern data analysts and developers to do more, faster.

Now, with Conversational Analytics, getting an answer from your data is as simple as chatting with your most knowledgeable colleague. By tapping into human conversation, Conversational Analytics relieves you from struggling with complex dashboard filters, obscure field names, or the need to write custom SQL.

“At YouTube, we’re focused on helping creators succeed and bring their creativity to the world. We’ve been testing Conversational Analytics in Looker to give our partner managers instant, actionable data that lets them quickly guide creators and optimize creator support.” – Thomas Seyller, Senior Director, Technology & Insights, YouTube Business 

The general availability of Conversational Analytics combines the reasoning power of Gemini, new capabilities in Google’s agentic frameworks, and the trusted data modeling of the Looker platform. Together, these set the stage for the next chapter in self-service analytics, making reliable data insights accessible to the entire enterprise. Conversational Analytics agents can understand your questions and provide insightful answers to questions about your data.

New at general availability is the ability to analyze data across domains. You can ask questions that integrate insights from up to five distinct Looker Explores (pre-joined views), spanning multiple business areas. Additionally, you can share the agents you build with colleagues, giving them faster access to a single source of truth, speeding consensus, and driving uniform decisions.

Built on a trusted, governed foundation

The power of Conversational Analytics isn’t just in the conversation it enables; it’s in the trust of the underlying data. Conversational Analytics is grounded in Looker’s semantic layer, which ensures that every metric, field, and calculation is centrally defined and consistent, acting as a crucial context engine for AI. As more of your colleagues rapidly use these expanded capabilities, you need to know the results they see and act on are accurate.

For analysts looking to explore data or everyday users receiving insights in the context of their business, Conversational Analytics also improves data self-service, minimizing technical friction that can create bottlenecks and leaves insights locked away.

You can now:

• Ask anything, anytime: Get instant answers to simple questions like “Show me our website traffic last month for shoe sales,” leading to deeper questions and greater insights across business areas and domains.

• Deepen the discovery: Move beyond the constraints of static dashboards and ask open-ended questions like, “Show me the trend of website traffic over the past six months and filter it by the California region.” The system intelligently generates the appropriate query and visualization instantly.

• Extend enterprise BI: Connect your Looker models to your enterprise BI ecosystem, centralize and share agents, and create new dashboards, starting with a prompt. Built on top of Looker Explores, Conversational Analytics’ natural language interface usesLookML for fine tuning and output accuracy.

• Pivot quickly: The conversational interface supports multi-turn questions, so you can iterate on your findings. Ask for total sales, then follow up with, “Now show me that as an area chart, broken down by payment method.”

• Gain full transparency: To build confidence and data literacy, the “How was this calculated?” feature provides a clear, natural language explanation of the underlying query that generated the results, so that you understand the source of your findings.

Empower the BI analyst and business user

Conversational Analytics is democratizing data for business teams, helping them govern the business’s data. At the same time, it’s also enhancing productivity and influence for data analysts and developers.

When business users can self-serve trusted data insights, data analysts see fewer interruptions and “ad-hoc” ticket requests, and can instead focus on high-impact work. Analysts can customize their client teams’ BI experiences by building Conversational Analytics agents that define common questions, filters, and style guidelines, so different teams can act on the same data in different ways.

Get ready to start talking

Conversational Analytics is available now for all Looker platform users. Your admin can enable it in your Looker instance today and you will discover how easy it is to move from simply asking “What?” to confidently determining “What’s next?” For more information, review the product documentation or watch this video tutorial.