What is Francois Ajenstat up to?
The Ferraro Consulting POV on @Golden Analytics
Last week I had the privilege of sitting down with @Francois Ajenstat, Founder and CEO of @Golden Analytics, and former CPO of @Tableau. We talked about AI-enabled business intelligence, something I have been covering since 2017. Our discussion stoked my thinking about the current business intelligence and agentic analytics market.
There are the “imposters,” old BI companies that snapped generative AI onto their products and call them agentic; the “innovators,” vendors that were smart enough to invest in AI-enablement and semantic layers all the way back in the mid-2010s; the “incoming,” more recent startups that have bold and flashy agentic AI capabilities built into their products but lack enterprise-readiness; the “inert,” who are so bogged down by legacy architecture they won’t survive the decade; and finally, the “inventors,” the AI-first companies whose very architecture was built from the ground up to support native agentic, headless, and enterprise-ready analytics.
There are several things that make Golden Analytics unique as an “inventor”:
AI First Architecture: With AI at the core of Golden Analytics, every part of the analytics flow in Golden is AI-driven, including data discovery, data preparation, automated insights, dashboard creation, descriptive narrative, storytelling, and collaboration. MCP makes Golden’s curated insights accessible and sharable.
The “Slider of Autonomy”: This is a critical shift in human-AI collaboration. Rather than having AI automatically do everything, the platform allows the human to define the level of AI intervention. Not only does this ensure that users retain control over the final analysis, it is a great bridge between traditional business intelligence and agentic analytics for users who are new to the game.
Automatic Analytic Workflow: Everyone has access to insight when the platform automatically profiles data at the point of connection, cleanses data, separates the signals from the noise, and gives users enough insight to start the conversation.
Analysis Optimizer: In the same way that databases optimize queries, Golden Analytics has a built-in optimizer that understands how people ask questions of data, routes the question through the best model, and helps users get to the answer they need more quickly.
Stories and Collaboration: Golden Analytics includes workspaces where users collaborate, and storytelling baked into the platform with a little help from analyst-grade explanations from the AI.
@Ferraro Consulting POV: Francois Ajenstat has an advantage right out of the gates. He was responsible for Tableau at the height of its fame and fortune. That means he understands customers, knows how to deliver what customers want, and understands what it takes to turn users into fanatics. Where Tableau inspired a whole generation of data people, Golden Analytics has the potential to ignite a movement of analysts and agents.
I was most impressed by Francois’ unique understanding of analytics users, and the way he has added a human element to platform design that takes into account what people need to transition from legacy BI to agentic analytics. Instead of forcing users to abandon their familiar territory and adopt something completely new, Golden Analytics gives people a natural pathway from legacy BI to modern autonomous analytics.
My favorite takeaway: Look at this ‘What’s New’ page: It makes me feel like the start of an old Tableau conference, only better: https://goldenanalytics.com/product/whats-new
