Our Thoughts on the Sigma Winter Product Launch

Sigma continues to impress, by building advanced tools for data-driven organizations while addressing the persistent challenges of legacy BI tools. This combination gives them a strong competitive advantage and showcases their scalability. By striking the right balance between innovation and practical solutions, Sigma encourages effective data practices, supports seamless report migrations, and equips organizations with the tools to tackle new challenges. That balance is apparent in this year’s winter launch, which has many exciting enhancements for data professionals. Three key updates are Ask Sigma, AI Query, and Export Bursting.

As we’ve discussed in recent blog posts, the demand for AI agent integration in BI tooling is increasing tremendously, since businesses and data practitioners are eager to deploy tools that will accelerate insights. In their winter launch, Sigma responds to this demand with Ask Sigma, a tool that allows users to interact with their workbooks in plain language.

In our opinion, Ask Sigma and similar technologies that let users ask AI questions in plain language are currently the most useful AI agents. We’ve seen other platforms use AI agents to build full reports or deliver interactive graphs, but they’re often difficult to support and maintain, and more importantly, they provide inaccurate insights. In our experience, deploying an overly complex agent isn’t realistic or feasible for many organizations right now. Instead, we recommend that clients focus on simplified and interactive solutions like Ask Sigma to accelerate insights building and decrease the number of ad-hoc requests they receive.

Another distinguishing characteristic of Ask Sigma is that it shows how its answers are calculated so that non-technical users feel comfortable with its insights. Here are use cases for this capability that we think add tremendous value.

1. For analysts to use during solo exploration or collaboration with their team. This tool helps answer the first, second, and third questions to quickly identify trends, develop hypotheses, and provide actionable insights to their teams.
2. For business users presenting performance reviews. The Sigma reports have a lot of drill-down capabilities that help teams describe performance but undoubtedly there will be follow-up questions. Ask Sigma can answer follow-up questions during these meetings to provide context or closure on performance trends.
3. For executives or board members to use during meetings. This will encourage conversation around the results just presented so there’s no need for follow-ups to basic questions, accelerating productive conversation. Also, this solution is relatively straightforward because the data required to address executive questions typically resides in gold-layer tables. These refined tables enable optimal performance by simplifying queries to straightforward metrics or calculations.

Beyond Ask Sigma, the product launch also introduced AI Query. This functionality allows Sigma users to interact with any AI/ML models in their CDW (currently they support Snowflake and Databricks). Combined with custom functions, business users will now have a no-code solution for interacting with models in your warehouse. In addition to custom models your team may build, Sigma can immediately use the built-in language learning models (LLM) functionalities in Snowflake and Databricks such as summarize, sentiment, or complete. Although this streamlined process is impressive and introduces tremendous opportunities, it’s best suited for more advanced organizations.

In addition to its AI functionality, Sigma’s introduction of "export bursting" stands out as a practical solution for report automation. This advanced scheduler enables users to create and distribute dynamically populated reports based on preconfigured permissions. While some may view this as a step back from cutting-edge innovation, it addresses the critical needs of organizations still modernizing their data stacks. As noted in Sigma’s presentation, flat-file reporting remains a cornerstone for many businesses — a reality we frequently encounter. By investing in this feature, Sigma demonstrates a thoughtful approach, embracing existing workflows as part of a broader modernization journey. Combined with Sigma's intuitive and robust role-based permissions, this enhancement is not only powerful but also easy to implement and maintain. Two examples illustrate its potential impact:

1. A client migrating from Business Objects had to send performance reports to manufacturers, each with strict data security requirements. Their solution involved creating individual reports for each manufacturer in their BI tool and using Python scripts to email them. This manual and repetitive process increased the risk of data integrity issues and added significant maintenance overhead. With Sigma's Export Bursting, the team could have built a single, repeatable reporting process, ensuring secure, automated distribution while simplifying governance and reducing development time.
2. Another client required monthly reports for their business unit heads, all tracking identical metrics with the same visualizations. Their existing process involved an analyst exporting PDFs from Sigma, manually re-filtering for each business unit, and repeating the export — a time-consuming task for an already overburdened data team. By implementing Export Bursting, the reports could have been generated and distributed automatically, saving valuable time, and enabling the team to focus on higher-priority initiatives.

In our opinion, this feature is ideal for teams in the early stages of their modernization journey. By ensuring seamless continuity with existing reporting workflows, Export Bursting can help data teams secure buy-in for Sigma without disrupting current processes. This offers data teams a significant advantage — it enables them to automate reporting, deliver value quickly, and focus on developing advanced solutions that demonstrate the full potential of their organization’s data. It’s worth noting that this feature is currently in private beta, with broader availability anticipated soon.

Why We Continue to Love Sigma

We were very impressed with Sigma’s winter product launch this year. Sigma continues to show its ability to provide meaningful value to businesses of all sizes, regardless of where they are in their data modernization journey. Its scalability and adaptability make it a standout choice for organizations looking to grow their analytics capabilities.

Want to know more about Sigma’s latest enhancements and how you can leverage them in your organization? Reach out. We would be happy to discuss them and show you how they can add value to your business.