Yellowfin BI 9.18 Brings Conversational Analytics You Can Trust
The new release of our data analytics platform lets users ask questions about their data in plain language, get detailed reports faster by using AI, and verify every insight.
We are happy to announce the general availability of version 9.18 of Yellowfin BI, our business intelligence and embedded analytics platform. This release marks a step forward in how organizations and ISVs can combine the power of modern AI models with an auditable data analysis process.
With the arrival of Yellowfin BI 9.18 we have combined all the AI-powered features into a single interface named “Conversational Analytics”, in which users can ask questions about their data in natural language. For example, users can ask “Show me the monthly sales data for Texas for the last three quarters” and choose whether Yellowfin BI should generate a single Report (in the form of a table or a chart), or a comprehensive, interactive data Story, containing comments on the insights uncovered by the system.
If a report ends up raising more questions than answers, users can ask follow-up questions to find out even more about these surfaced insights. This useful feature is complemented with full chat history, context retention, control over token usage, and background processing for deeper analysis. To deliver these deep and smart Reports and Stories, our platform will rely on AI tools organizations already use, such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, while retaining all the governance rules to generate trustworthy reports and insights.
System administrators are able to configure access to AI-powered features on all levels, from company-wide to individual users. In practice, this means that all existing user-level and row-level access rules and all other security requirements are maintained, but also the organization has full control over how AI uses the data to create comprehensive reports. On top of that, Yellowfin BI administrators are able to monitor all interactions between the platform and the AI tool, keeping a close eye on both data governance and costs generated from token usage.
Brad Scarff, Chief Technology Officer at Yellowfin, explains how this release reflects an important strategic direction on the role of AI within an analytics platform: “The problem with AI-powered analytics is producing a report a CEO or a CFO will be comfortable signing their name to on a Monday morning. Yellowfin BI 9.18 uses AI to generate single reports or complex data stories, with every step of that process available for users to audit. This way they can get rich insights without the risk of relying on AI hallucinations.”
With the 9.18 release we have continued improving the UI of our platform, especially in adjusting the views to smaller screen sizes, adapted to responsive UI views on smartphones and tablets. Besides Browse and Stories pages and top navigation, now Report Output Page, Dashboard Output Page (non-Canvas), Timeline/Tasks, as well as pop-up windows associated with those pages, have layouts that adjust automatically to fit smaller viewports, collapsing menus where needed and preserving functionality of views and reports.
Organizations who are still skeptical about using AI in conjunction with their data, especially the ones in regulated industries, would be happy to know that these new, AI-powered features can be turned off. In that case, the users will revert to the already known Guided NLQ interface, where they can also ask questions about their data and get quick answers, but the underlying data never leaves the system and is not analyzed by any external AI tool.
More detailed information about the new features and improvement brought by Yellowfin BI 9.18 can be found in the Release Notes here
Interested in learning how Yellowfin BI 9.18 could fit into your organization’s needs for data analytics or be seamlessly embedded into your application?