To make business decisions at scale, you need to ask the right questions. But to ask the right questions, you need access to the right insights. And that’s where many business leaders hit the wall.
Consider the traditional business intelligence (BI) process. Accessing and exploring data requires you to jog through a swamp of people, processes, and technologies. You’re over here working on one app, but to get the insights you need, you’re forced to switch between tools—logging in, managing permissions, and waiting on overburdened data teams.
But what if business intelligence wasn’t a complicated maze? What if searching for data was so intuitive you hardly noticed you were doing it? This is what’s possible with embedded business intelligence. In fact, a survey by the Product Led Alliance found that more than half of respondents say embedded analytics directly boost engagement and revenue.
Whether you’re looking to make real-time, data-driven decisions, reshape the future of your business with generative AI, or both, understanding the nuances of embedded business intelligence will help you gain a competitive edge. And that’s exactly what we will do in this article.
Table of contents:
Embedded business intelligence (BI), also known as embedded analytics, integrates rich data analytics into the user’s existing business applications, workflows, and software—helping non-technical users unlock relevant insights connected to the context.
By embedding analytics into familiar applications, anyone in your organization can easily search an enormous body of data. Each arm of the modern tech stack is unified and integrated, creating a two-way flow of data from tools like customer relationship management systems (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, and external-facing products.
Embedded business intelligence vs traditional BI
Let’s say you're a marketing manager trying to track the performance of a new campaign. To make a solid decision, you’ll need insights into the conversion rates, customer engagement, and ad spend ROI to adjust your strategy.
With traditional BI, uncovering insights about your campaign performance is a complex web of tools and steps that hinders your ability to act in real time. First, you log into a separate BI platform that might disconnected from your marketing tools. From there, you must pull data from multiple sources—online campaigns, CRM software, website analytics, and more. After gathering the data, you need to clean, filter, and manipulate all this data, often relying on a data team for support.
Even when the reports are ready, if you want to explore a specific data point further, you must go back to the data team and wait for weeks to get a response. This entire process is slow and fragmented, creating significant delays in your ability to make timely, data-driven decisions.
Now, imagine embedding a BI solution like ThoughtSpot into your workflow. There's no need to switch between tools or spend time on complex processes. Within seconds, you can create a marketing Liveboard that displays real-time campaign performance. Moreover, you can leverage AI-powered capabilities, including natural language search, drill-anywhere visualizations, and enhanced reporting to gain a 360-degree view of your campaign data—all within one platform.
As data explodes, organizations need an embedded BI solution to help their team and customers utilize data for faster decision-making. Although most product development teams can build such a solution, it is a huge undertaking. On the other hand, A pre-built embedded BI solution offers connectivity with multiple databases, allowing you to deploy the solution within days, not weeks. Feeling confused? Let’s explore the benefits and drawbacks of each approach so you can make an informed decision.
Benefits of building a BI solution
Tailored to specific needs: Building your own embedded BI solution allows you to design it precisely for your business requirements. You can create custom dashboards, reports, and analytics tailored to your workflows, ensuring the solution addresses unique challenges that some off-the-shelf solutions might not provide.
Complete ownership: With an in-house solution, you have complete ownership over its features, integrations, and updates. By eliminating dependency on third-party vendors, you can add new functionalities without worrying about licensing restrictions.
Drawbacks of building a BI solution
High development costs: Organizations have to invest significant capital in building a solution from scratch. These expenses include development costs, integration overheads, infrastructure costs, and licensing costs for other tools. And if data analysis and BI are not your competency, you may need to invest extra time and resources in establishing an entirely new team.
Long deployment time: Deployment can take considerable time, especially if you want to design and implement complex reporting and analysis features. Your team must rigorously test these BI capabilities within the existing application to ensure seamless integration with the application's architecture, workflows, and user interface—a process that is both technically demanding and time-intensive.
Complex maintenance: Another key factor to consider is scalability and flexibility. When you build an embedded BI solution in-house, you are responsible for its maintenance, updates, and support. As your analytics needs grow, it will become difficult to scale and manage the infrastructure.
Benefits of embedding pre-built BI solution
Cost-friendly: Buying an embedded analytics solution eliminates development costs and ongoing maintenance burdens. With a one-time investment in the solution and its integration, you’re equipped to meet both your current and future data needs.
Customization: Best of all, a pre-built embedded business intelligence solution offers a customizable user interface, empowering everyone to glean actionable insights from complex datasets without extensive training.
Faster time-to-market: A pre-built embedded BI solution offers connectivity with multiple databases, allowing you to deploy the solution within days, not weeks. This reduces the time-to-insights when compared to building a solution from scratch.
Drawbacks of embedding pre-built BI solution
Not a perfect match: Off-the-shelf embedded BI solutions may not perfectly align with your business’s unique needs. While they may offer multiple customization options, they often can’t be tailored as extensively as a custom-built solution.
Ongoing subscription costs: Many vendors operate on a subscription model, which can result in ongoing costs for licensing, maintenance, and support.
As we enter an AI-powered era, your business needs embedded analytics that can quickly fill product gaps and make data more accessible to decision-makers. In-house analytics tools often fall short, struggling to accommodate growing business needs. Embedded analytics, however, tackle these limitations head-on, offering a flexible, future-proof solution that delivers real-time insights, right when it matters most.
Not convinced? Take it from Harri, a SaaS company that helps businesses in the hospitality sector manage their workforce. To meet the growing demands of the hospitality community, they decided to relaunch their product with the intention of offering users a real-time, self-service analytics experience. And for this, they choose ThoughtSpot Embedded.
Watch this video to see how Hari leveraged ThoughtSpot’s easy-to-integrate, embedded analytics solution to drive customer engagement:
Self-service BI empowers users, giving them the data-backed confidence to make critical business decisions. When you embed data directly into the platforms you already use, users can access relevant, nuanced insights to tell stories with data.
So how are companies actually benefiting from embedded BI? Here are four ways businesses are turning embedded analytics into value.
1. Boosts decision intelligence
When you’re armed with quality data, you become a data-driven business. Instead of going into an outdated dashboard or relying on insights from a data analyst, your non-technical users can leverage self-service BI. This empowers employees to analyze data right in applications they’re already using throughout the workday—no IT or technical expertise is required.
This process could look like embedding analytics into your customer relationship management (CRM) tool, enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, or website. Your internal teams can efficiently and comprehensively extract valuable data insights, leading to reached KPIs and increased revenue targets. Moreover, Embedded BI also helps businesses scale, freeing up time for data teams to focus on more strategic initiatives.
For instance, embedding ThoughtSpot into its existing application helped MDaudit, a leading healthcare billing compliance and revenue integrity SaaS platform, boost its business growth by 25%.
With ThoughtSpot, healthcare executives could easily track team productivity and measure performance outcomes. Data analysts were empowered to generate their own insights on auditing, billing, payment risks, and more. Meanwhile, executive users could access strategic insights simply by asking questions in plain English, eliminating the need to rely on technical teams. By giving front-line workers seamless access to data, MDaudit gained a distinct advantage, setting itself apart from competitors in the industry.
2. Creates a data-driven culture
Embedded BI nurtures a culture of data fluency by bringing data into the day-to-day workflows. You no longer have to be a data analyst or analytics engineer to interact with data. In fact, you don’t even have to know how to interpret a data visualization. You just receive the data in context at the right time so you can make a more informed decision.
This culture shift becomes even more impactful with an Embedded BI solution like ThoughtSpot, where everyone is empowered to use data—not just intuition—to make decisions. For instance, with Spotter, as your AI Analyst, business users can ask complex business questions in natural language and receive instant insights.
They are free to engage with their data, ask follow-up questions, drill into insights, and explore relevant areas of analysis to reveal deeper insights, within minutes. Fostering this culture of self-service analytics helps businesses unlock new levels of efficiency, innovate constantly, and scale decision-making.
3. Saves time and increases productivity
Embedded reporting saves time for leaders across your company—decreasing frustration and increasing productivity. Here’s a sneak peak at the value prop for your org chart:
Data leaders can efficiently harness insights to create rich data storytelling.
Sales teams no longer have to pore over individual dashboards and make connections between complex data sets. Instead, data is integrated into commonly used systems like Salesforce.
Product leaders can access key business metrics contextualized within familiar workflows and software.
Data teams can focus on higher-value tasks when business leaders are empowered to become data analysts.
Developers can use their time developing the product instead of building an embedded analytics experience.
Your customers save time, too. When they can access valuable data about the company and product, they get their questions answered without going through the loop of asking for support.
This was the case for Act-On. Previously, Act-On’s customers had to rely on static reports and external tools, making real-time insight discovery nearly impossible. With ThoughtSpot Embedded’s conversational interface, customers across all levels of technical expertise could directly work with data and analyze complex marketing funnels. In fact, they saw over 60% higher report usage over the previous reporting system within the first months of implementation.
1. ThoughtSpot
ThoughtSpot Embedded is the go-to choice for the world’s most innovative companies to deliver decision-ready insights exactly when and where they need them.
With ThoughtSpot Embedded, you can bring the power of AI-powered analytics into your existing applications and portals, creating new revenue streams and a faster time-to-market for your business. Using just a few more lines of code, you can tailor the styling and look-and-feel of ThoughtSpot—making it truly yours. With enterprise-ready SDKs and seamless integrations, you can ship scalable, tested, and fully customized analytics experiences—without compromising speed or security.
Core features:
Low-code interface: Easily integrate and customize ThoughtSpot into your applications and products with just a few lines of code.
Different embed options: Choose whether you want to embed certain components—like the conversational AI experience, entire Liveboards, single visualizations—or the full capabilities of the platform.
Enterprise-ready SDKs: Use ready-to-use, scalable SDKs to create on-brand experiences for your customers and partners.
Integrated developer playground: Make deployment easier with an integrated developer playground that allows developers to prototype and preview workflows directly within the platform.
AI-powered analytics: Give your customers the analytics experience they crave with interactive and engaging features like Spotter, SpotIQ, and AI Highlights.
Experience how ThoughtSpot Embedded can empower your customers, partners, and stakeholders to gain greater value from their data—schedule a demo today.
2. Metabase
Metabase is an embedded BI platform that enables businesses to embed dashboards and other analytical features into their applications. While it offers SDKs and some low-code functionality, it is critical to know that embedding dashboards requires significant effort. Many users on public forums have even reported slow query times and scalability issues that may impact the overall user experience.
Core features:
Dashboard and reporting: Allows businesses to embed custom visuals and dashboards into applications, websites, and other portals.
Embedding SDKs: Developers can use SDKs to embed certain components like dashboards and reporting into their existing platform.
Multiple data connectors: Supports integration with multiple data sources, including cloud-based databases, APIs, and third-party applications.
3. Tableau Embedded
Tableau provides an embedded business intelligence solution that allows businesses to integrate data visualizations and dashboards into their applications and workflows. Although Tableau Embedded excels in the data visualization arena, it can be quite challenging for business users to understand the entire suite of advanced capabilities. Additionally, the total cost of ownership (TCO) for Tableau can be quite high, especially when considering licensing, implementation, and ongoing maintenance costs. These restrictions can make Tableau less accessible for organizations looking for a more cost-effective or user-friendly embedded BI solution.
Core features:
Custom-built visualizations: Allows users to embed tailored visualizations and dashboards into their applications.
Embedded playground: Offers a built-in environment where developers can test and refine workflows for deployment.
UI customization: Developers can customize the look and feel of the embedded content to match their brand guidelines.
4. Power BI Embedded
Power BI Embedded is Microsoft’s embedded BI solution that supports the integration of data visualizations and dashboards into applications, especially for those using Microsoft products. The platform also offers flexible configuration options, allowing businesses to author user experiences with various authentication levels. However, the platform does present users with certain challenges. For instance, embedding Power BI requires significant coding and expertise, as developers must navigate through extensive documentation and write considerable amounts of code to ensure proper integration. Moreover, performance issues and limited customization options may also impact the overall user experience.
Core features:
Integration with Microsoft ecosystem: Connectivity with other Microsoft products such as Azure, Dynamics 365, and Office 365.
Pre-set dashboards and visualization options: Allows users to embed pre-set dashboard templates into applications, web portals, and products.
Desktop and mobile availability: Enables users to access embedded dashboards and visualizations from both desktop and mobile devices.
5. Domo Everywhere
Domo Everywhere is another player in the market, allowing businesses to integrate data visualizations and dashboards into applications, portals, and workflows. It also offers developer tools like SDKs and APIs, which can be integrated into a product UI. While Domo focuses on a user-centric approach, it can sometimes fall short due to performance issues and a steep learning curve.
Core features:
Developer tools: Provides tools like Apps, Form Builder, and Domo Bricks that help developers collect data and build custom interactions.
Data transformation: Allows users to clean, shape, and transform data.
Low-code interface: Offers a low-code interface that allows developers to embed reporting and analytical capabilities into product offerings.
Choosing the right embedded BI solution is essential to help your customers navigate the complexities of a data-rich environment. To help you make the correct decision, here are five features to look at in your evaluation process:
1. Handles large data volumes efficiently: Scalability is critical for businesses as their data grows in size and complexity. Choose a tool that has multiple connectors and can analyze large datasets, without compromising on speed and performance.
2. Has interactive visualization capabilities: It’s a universal truth that visualizations can help everyone comprehend insights and build contextual data stories. Ensure that the embedded BI solution you choose offers interactive visualizations, including charts, graphs, and tables that allow users to dig deeper into data.
3. Offers customizable dashboards: Live dashboards track critical KPIs and also offer context for faster decision-making. Make sure that your embedded tool allows users to build customizable dashboards, allowing them to keep a pulse on important business activities.
4. Makes accessing data simple: If your embedded solution is limited to only technically skilled users, it won’t allow other teams to explore the potential of data. Choose a self-service analytics tool with an intuitive interface that allows everyone to gain access to insights without extensive training.
5. Supports mobile compatibility: As the workforce becomes global, having a solution that allows users to access reports and dashboards on various devices is beneficial.
By embedding BI throughout your organization, you make data accessible to your internal teams and customers—this is a competitive advantage in a saturated marketplace. Embedded business intelligence empowers business leaders to make smart decisions and decipher complex data stacks.
As the analytics layer of the modern data stack, ThoughtSpot’s AI-Powered Analytics is the antidote to the antiquated business intelligence market. Now, everyone in your organization can search and interact with live data. And with our embedded BI solutions, business users can experience this data without ever leaving the workflows and processes they’re already used to.
Start a free 14-day free trial to see how embedded BI can revolutionize your company’s relationship with data.
