AI Readiness Assessment For SMBs: Which AI Wave Is Your Team Actually Operating In

Agentic AI is the loudest topic in data and analytics, and if your leadership has started asking where your team stands, a shrug is no longer an acceptable answer. BARC's 2026 research offers a better one. In corporate performance management (CPM), one of the most natural use cases for agentic AI, the barriers organizations report…

Ask ten data engineers to name the most trusted ETL tools and you'll get a short list of products followed by a much longer list of caveats. This guide covers the tools that hold up in production, including Fivetran + dbt Labs, Airbyte, Matillion, Qlik Talend Cloud, Informatica, and the native services from the three…

Most AI pilots never get cancelled. They demo well in the spring, pick up a second round of scope over the summer, and by autumn the two people who built the thing have been pulled onto something with a firmer deadline, without anyone writing the word "failed" anywhere. The question of why AI pilots fail…

Prompt engineering for data analysts has one failure mode that general AI writing advice never touches: the model returns SQL that parses cleanly, runs without error, and produces a number that's wrong in a way no one catches until somebody questions the dashboard three weeks later. The request was usually underspecified rather than the model…

Give a competent engineering team a week and they'll have something working. A GPT endpoint wired up, a charting library on the front end, a handful of SQL queries hitting the production database, and there it is, the new "AI-powered insights" feature ready for the demo deck.

In most mid-market companies, the BI half of the picture is the part that's settled: the dashboards refresh overnight, the Monday reports land in inboxes, and there's a tidy stack of SQL behind every figure on screen. What's new is the pressure coming from above to bolt AI onto all of it, and somewhere between…

You're managing 400 SKUs. You treat every product the same, same reorder triggers, same attention, same safety stock logic. Then one of your top-10 revenue products runs out on a Tuesday, and the slow-moving items nobody orders pile up in the warehouse. That's the problem ABC analysis solves.

Somewhere in the growth of most B2B SaaS products, customers start asking for the same thing: a way to see and report on their own data without leaving the app. Embedded analytics for SaaS exists to answer exactly that, putting a branded dashboard inside your product instead of pointing each client toward a separate reporting…

Intro Your team spent weeks building a dashboard. You shared the link. Nobody opened it. Dashboard abandonment is one of the most expensive and least-discussed problems in business intelligence — not because the data is wrong, but because adoption was never treated as part of the build. Every dashboard your team creates but no one…

Every hour your team spends manually checking dashboards is an hour not spent fixing what those dashboards reveal. By the time someone spots a problem (a campaign bleeding budget over the weekend, a location with a sudden cost spike, a trial account going quiet), the window for action has already narrowed. Automated dashboard alerts change…