Sigma’s Fall 2025 Launch: AI-Driven BI & Workflow Automation

On September 10th, Sigma announced its Fall 2025 Product Launch, and it’s clear they’re leaning into a vision that many modern BI platforms have promised but few have truly delivered on: BI that drives workflows, not just reports.

While the launch includes a long list of new features (and to be fair, many of them are still labelled as “coming soon”), what stands out to us isn’t just their breadth, but how closely they reflect the practical, day-to-day needs of data teams. Rather than chasing headline-grabbing AI gimmicks, Sigma has delivered thoughtful updates that will help teams reduce manual work, scale trusted insights, and move from dashboards to decisions.

In this post, rather than echoing or summarizing every single detail Sigma announced (you can read their blog post here), we’re focusing on three areas we believe will make the biggest difference for organizations trying to balance modern data ambitions with very real operational constraints:

• Smarter AI that accelerates exploration, not confusion
• Operational reporting that respects your legacy needs
• Workflow automation inside the BI layer

Ask Sigma Grows Up, And Gets More Useful

Ask Sigma has always impressed us because it takes a more grounded approach to AI in BI. Instead of trying to build full dashboards or run unsupported analysis with a single prompt, it focused on making exploratory analysis easier and more intuitive, particularly for non-technical users.

The Fall 2025 release pushes that vision further with enhancements that move Ask Sigma closer to what we believe is an extremely useful AI agent model: context-aware, explainable, and governed.

The new Discovery Suggestions (coming soon) and Workbook Recommendations (coming soon) are especially valuable for business users. One of the biggest challenges we see clients face is not in querying data, but in finding the right data in the first place, especially in instances where dozens of dashboards overlap.

By recommending trusted workbooks or surfacing curated insights before a user even asks a question, Sigma reduces friction and helps ensure more accurate, aligned decision-making across teams.

These enhancements also reinforce a larger theme we’re excited about: AI that helps analysts and business users work faster but does not replace their work entirely. In a landscape where many tools overpromise and underdeliver AI-generated insights, Sigma’s take feels refreshing and far more useful to the teams we support.

Operational Reporting That Moves Past the Excel Crutch

For all the innovation we’ve seen in modern BI tooling, many organizations still find themselves exporting dashboards to Excel for one simple reason: they need precision formatting and personalized delivery that most platforms can’t offer.

Sigma’s launch of Pixel-Perfect Reporting (coming soon) and updates to Enterprise Bursting (coming soon) directly address this gap. The value here is straightforward. Instead of designing dashboards in Sigma, exporting to Excel, reformatting, manually slicing, and sending PDFs to dozens (or thousands) of recipients, you will now be able to do all that in Sigma, with live warehouse data, and without sacrificing brand polish or compliance requirements.

We’ve seen how painful this process can be. One client we worked with sent monthly reports to many stakeholders using a highly manual workflow that included multiple analysts and redundant report copies. With Enterprise Bursting’s new support for 10,000–20,000-row splits, and built-in permissions enforcement, that entire process could be automated and governed in Sigma.

This is one of those features that might not wow in a demo, but it will save countless hours and significantly reduce risk in real operations. For many organizations, it could be the difference between continuing to support legacy tooling or fully migrating to Sigma.

From Dashboards to Data Apps, With No Extra SaaS Tools

Perhaps the most important direction we see in this release is Sigma’s shift toward actionability. Dashboards are only as useful as the decisions and workflows they enable and until now, BI tools have mostly stopped short of execution.

Sigma’s Data Apps are quietly changing that.

With the new If/Else logic (coming soon), Row Updates (coming soon), and Notification Actions (coming soon), Sigma is giving teams the power to build governed, logic-driven workflows directly inside the reporting layer. This is particularly exciting for the kinds of lightweight, cross-functional processes that often fall between systems, like approvals, escalations, and review cycles.

We once worked with a healthcare client whose operations team managed exception handling through spreadsheets and emails. This process was slow, error-prone, and hard to track. With Sigma’s new features, that entire workflow could be replaced by a live, governed solution integrated with Slack—no custom app or additional tools required.

This kind of embedded interactivity could reshape how teams think about BI: not just as a place to understand what happened, but as a platform for Accelerating what happens next.

It’s a trend we expect to see across the industry, and Sigma is ahead of the curve.

What This Launch Signals for the Industry

The Fall 2025 launch isn’t about flashy AI or speculative futures. It’s about solving real, persistent problems with clean, governed solutions. Sigma is showing a clear understanding of what today’s data teams are up against: backlogs of ad-hoc reporting, business users stuck in Excel, legacy tools still doing mission-critical work, and a growing appetite for automation that doesn’t sacrifice control.

Rather than ignoring those realities, Sigma is building toward them and making it easier to adopt AI responsibly, reduce operational pain, and expand the impact of analytics without creating more chaos.