As decision-makers, you’re constantly navigating uncharted waters, launching new products, reshaping teams, and responding to rapid market shifts. During times like these, timely insights aren’t just helpful; they keep you moving in the right direction.
Too often, however, getting these insights means wrestling with clunky dashboards, juggling multiple tools, and constant workflow friction—just to get one clear answer.
Enter embedded reporting. Instead of making you hunt for insights, it brings them straight into the tools you already use—so you can make faster decisions, save time, and hit your goals with less effort.
See how embedded reporting delivers faster answers and better decisions, right where your work happens.
Table of contents:
Embedded reporting is a form of business intelligence that puts insights directly into the tools your team already uses—no need to switch platforms or wait for reports.
It works by integrating business intelligence capabilities, often through APIs, SDKs, or iframes, directly into your product or internal app. This setup allows you to interact with live data, ask questions, apply filters, and even drill into specific metrics without ever having to leave the platform you’re already working in.
This isn’t an add-on; it’s a smarter way to connect insight with action.
1. Real-time data access: Your users don’t have to wait for answers anymore. Embedded reporting delivers up-to-date insights instantly, so decisions are always based on the latest information, not yesterday’s numbers.
2. Low-code embeddable components: With low-code components and flexible APIs, analytics blends seamlessly into your product. You can even tweak the colors, fonts, and logos to match your brand perfectly to deliver an experience that’s on-brand and fast to market.
3. Self-service functionality: Built-in search, filtering, drill-downs, and interactive dashboards let users explore data on their own terms. These features are designed for non-technical users, so everyone can get answers to their questions without depending on analysts.
4. AI-powered insights: Modern embedded reporting solutions offer AI and machine learning capabilities. These tools automatically surface patterns, anomalies, and trends, helping you focus on what matters most.
5. Custom dashboards and visuals: Customization is baked in. This will help you create role-specific dashboards for different teams and choose from a wide range of visuals, all without starting from scratch.
6. Sharing and collaboration: Sharing is built into the experience. You can share links, schedule exports, or push insights to collaboration tools like Slack or Teams, making it easy to keep other stakeholders in sync.
1. Save time and budget
Building custom reporting from scratch can drain resources quickly. With embedded analytics and flexible APIs, you can add powerful reporting without slowing down your dev team.
They stay focused on your core product, while users get real-time dashboards and automated insights, all built into their workflow. And because many solutions are SaaS-based, IT gets a break too: no server maintenance, no patching, no hassle. The impact? You get better use of your resources and more time for high-impact work.
2. Customize for every user
No two organizations are the same, so why should their reporting be? With embedded analytics, you can quickly cater every part of the experience—from layout and visuals to branding and load times, so it fits seamlessly into your product.
And because it’s built for speed, you can launch fast, make updates easily, and deliver a smooth, on-brand experience without slowing your team down.
3. Better user engagement
When users have to leave your app to make sense of data, engagement drops.
With powerful reporting built right into your product, users don’t have to jump through hoops to get answers. They can explore, visualize, and drill into data, all without ever leaving their workflow. The impact? Faster answers, less friction, and a more valuable product experience.
4. Improved insights
Embedded reporting gives you a clearer, more interactive view of what’s really going on in your business. Instead of piecing together data from multiple systems, users can access a unified view, right inside their Liveboard. That means less time toggling between tools and more time understanding the bigger picture.
With everything you need in one place, you can easily spot trends, discover insights, and catch opportunities you might’ve missed before.
5. Scalability
As your business grows, so does your data—and your need to make sense of it all. Embedded reporting is built to scale with you. By connecting with your cloud data platform, you can handle rising data volumes while giving users the power to explore insights on their own.
Whether you’re rolling out analytics to new teams, launching new products, or supporting more customers, this approach gives you a scalable, cost-effective way to deliver analytics.
Step 1: Plan for data integration and quality
First things first: make sure your reporting tool can pull in data from all the right sources securely, whether you’re using an ELT or ETL tool. Run regular checks for errors and keep an eye on data quality metrics to make sure your users are always working with live, reliable data.
Step 2: Establish clear reporting requirements
Before setting anything up, be clear about what problems you’re trying to solve. Ask yourself: What insights do your users actually need? Do you need charts, tables, or something more complex?
Setting clear goals helps you build reports that are useful, not just pretty.
Step 3: Ensure data security and compliance
The more people you give access to data, the more critical security becomes. Your embedded reporting solution should support role-based access controls, row-level security, and encryption, while complying with industry standards. This keeps sensitive information protected and builds trust with both internal users and customers.
Step 4: Provide appropriate training and support for users
Even the best reporting setup won’t stick if teams don’t know how to use it. That’s why it’s essential to provide business teams with the right training, documentation, and in-product guidance, so they feel confident exploring and acting on data.
The good news? Today’s embedded reporting tools are more intuitive than ever. With features like natural language search, you can simply type a question and get instant answers.
Step 5: Establish performance metrics and measure success
Embedded reporting isn’t just a feature in your product, it’s an investment. To know whether it’s paying off, you need to measure its impact with clear performance metrics tied to your goals.
Track things like user adoption, usage frequency, self-service rates, and time-to-insight to see how teams are engaging. Are they getting answers faster? Relying less on analysts? These signals show what’s working—and where to fine-tune.
Act-On
Act-On, a leading marketing automation company, embedded ThoughtSpot right into its core reporting platform, making advanced analytics simple and accessible for every user, no matter their tech background.
Now, marketers can explore complex data around funnels, campaigns, and spend without writing a single query. With an AI-powered search experience, users simply ask questions in natural language and get instant insights, visualizations, and smart recommendations. The result? A 60% surge in report usage.
🔍Takeaway for you: Instead of static, one-size-fits-all dashboards, giving your customers a dynamic, in-product experience puts insight right at their fingertips—and turns data into daily decisions.
Harri
Harri, a platform built for hospitality staffing, took a similar path. By embedding ThoughtSpot into its workflows, Harri gave managers and business leaders real-time visibility into operations.
With custom AI-augmented dashboards and automated insights, internal teams and even customers can now spot trends, catch issues, and make fast, informed decisions—without leaving the tools they already use.
The impact? Harri won major customer contracts, all the while empowering their internal teams to move faster.
🔍 Takeaway for you: If your team is constantly jumping between tools to find answers, consider what Harri did—embed insights where the work happens. It could be the shift that wins your next big deal.
MDaudit
MDaudit, a healthcare analytics provider, embedded ThoughtSpot into its mobile app, empowering users to access insights anytime, anywhere. Now, customers, stakeholders, and internal teams can dig deeper into their data without needing analysts.
Doing so, they achieved a 25% increase in business growth and a 40% boost in user adoption.
🔍The writing on the wall is clear: When you make data accessible and actionable right within the user’s workflow, engagement rises and business outcomes follow.
Delight your users with a better experience
Most teams today don’t lack data; they lack context. Numbers live in one tool, decisions happen in another, and you’re stuck bridging the gap. This naturally leads to missed opportunities and delayed actions, all because insights never reach the people when they need them most.
Embedded reporting solves this disconnect. It turns every product interaction into a moment of clarity. Insights show up where work happens, users stay in flow, and decisions happen faster.
This is exactly what ThoughtSpot Embedded is designed to do—turn your product into a continuous engine of real-time intelligence. With just a few lines of code, you can bring powerful AI Agents to life without burdening your engineering team or disrupting your user experience.
Experience how Agentic Analytics fits seamlessly into your product—book your free demo today!
