I’ll never pretend to be a software engineer. At best I can claim to be a data scientist and in many ways that is a stretch. I cut my teeth in data analysis. I learned python in Jupyter Notebooks. And while I have developed and launched a full SaaS - am still not a software engineer.

But I have lots of friends who are! My LinkedIn is a hodgepodge of software engineers, data engineers, data analysts, data scientists, sales engineers, and so much more.

But I’m noticing a disturbing trend: the ones talking about “agentic” anything are the software engineers.

As a data analyst, I actually made my mark out-running software engineers and data engineers. They moved too slow, too proper, too calculated, too risk-averse. I on the other hand moved overnight, in queries that ran through the dark hours of the night to answer questions that would directly impact the decisions made the next day.

My Fear

The lack of data folk talking AI on my feed has me worried. Is data becoming the “slow” department, where mainstream IT embraces agentic workflows and soars ahead!

So I guess, I’m publishing this as a warning? Maybe an alert? At the very least, an idea - traditional business intelligence (BI) tools are dying. The faster you abandon them and look to agentic tools the better.

If the data world stays stuck on these tools, they’re certain to fall behind!

The Challenger

I can spin up a dashboard, complete with data pipeline, SQL queries, and advanced filtering with only a sentence. I can add data quality controls with another, and I can add alerts and direct webhook calls with a third. Can PowerBI do that? That quickly? No, it cannot.

I myself am a Tableau fan, but PowerBI seems to be the dominant tool in the BI world for the moment. But it has a critical flaw! it’s not agent friendly.

My Recommendation

I’m going to get some flak for this, but it was what I was known for in the enterprise: it’s time to go rogue. It’s time to abandon the “approved” BI tools and it’s time to build out your own personalized agentic approach. Put Claude Code and Codex to work. I guarantee you that your productivity will improve, your end users will be pleased with the interactivity and actionability of your outputs, but most importantly - you will be preparing yourself for the next wave of Business Intelligence tools.

The next wave will be driven by words not by SQL. It will be fast and agile. It will be agentic: where a question is researched, cataloged, answered, and interrogated - all without a human.

Are you ready? As a person who truly identifies with the data practitioners of the world - we can’t let the other half of IT move faster. It’s a race, I’m competitive. We have to keep up or even pull ahead.

My challenge: deliver a vibe-coded solution. Tomorrow.