“I think the biggest threat for SaaS companies out there is this artifact space. It makes custom UIs, custom interfaces, custom reports. Do you go into Salesforce anymore? You just say, 'What are the top five people I should call this week?' And the AI just tells you. And that's your interface more and more.”
The Analytics Engineering Podcast · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
Context
The host asked whether dashboards will become throwaway objects once AI can generate them on demand. Fowler widens the claim from BI tools to software generally, arguing that AI-generated artifacts are replacing the application interface itself.
Transcript
…how do you not have the AI just like redo your work? And you have no say or power. It just like kind of undid your document and made a different copy of it. Instead, I want it to be like tweaking and editing and you can work collaboratively with it. And I think that's such a better experience.
…I need to build next month to like close the deals that I need to hit? And a lot of that stuff in the current era kind of goes away. Like it becomes easier. And so you can get back to focusing on what are the experiences we actually need as humans to intermediate with this massive volume of data.
Basically, because the AI can do so much and be so flexible, you don't want to put too many rails on it. You want to make sure that any of the rails you give it, and that's how we think about it. These rails are additive. They're just kind of like systems that like a framework that makes it easier, not and they're good building blocks to build on, but they're all escapable and they're all like things you can really customize. So because everybody does have these unique requests and all, you know, there's this long tail of requests in BI. It's just like never ending. That's something I really love about the space, actually. You know, Tableau, sorry, Excel is like 40 years old now, but they're still actively developing it. You know, there's still active feature requests on Excel. And because in the data space, there's this kind of like this never ending set of problems and use cases. And it's interesting to me. Like I love solving those problems. And so in this space, it's more about not restraining the AI, giving it more power and not restraining it so they can do all those things that the…
All right. Last question for you. For anyone who's curious, how do they get started and what do they get? So
you go to dbtcharts.com and there is a message to copy and paste to your claud. And you just say, basically start using DBT charts. And what will happen is your token costs will go down and the artifacts that are created will be prettier and governable. Readable, governable. And then, if you choose…
The paste these instructions into Claude installation method is ever more common, and I think it's such a great experience.
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