The New Analytics Aggregators

Analysis is the New Media

The first wave of the internet brought the power for anyone to distribute content without cost. Traditional business moats in Media, built around integrated control over publishing and distributing content were commoditized overnight. New entrants like Netflix, Spotify, and AirBnB took advantage of the technology shift by aggregating distributed content. Massive fortunes in news, music, and video shifted from controlling the means of distribution to aggregating distributors and controlling the means of demand.

Comparison of new and old integrated value in media. Source: Stratechary by Ben Thompson

With the advent of GenAI, a similar shift in value is happening in the world of analytics.

Analytics value is concentrated in building data pipelines.

Data pipelines are fragmented, specialized, and complex.

The past decade of winners in the analytics space have gotten there by owning steps in the end to end analysis process - whether that be ingestion, transformation, or visualization. Each tool built a moat by integrating inputs that required both specialized software and humans trained on that software. Companies had no choice but to build their own data pipeline and pick a tool for each stage in the process. E.G. Fivetran for ingestion, DBT for querying, Alteryx for pipeline building, PowerBI for visualization. Business moats revolved around owning these slices of the data pipeline.

Yet decision makers are still blocked from acting with data

Data teams in medium and large companies hold immense responsibility. They determine who has access to data and which decisions can be made with it. What’s more, in the face of growing business complexity, shifting data sources, and increases in the amount of data, data teams are failing to keep up with business user demand, resulting in data requests taking weeks or months. By the time decisions makers get insights, they’re often no longer relevant.

Decision makers are blocked by data teams

For the first time in decades, AI agents hold the keys to empower decision makers.

AI agents will disrupt the value chain and commoditize data pipelines

In the same way the internet brought the marginal cost of distributing content to zero, the advent of AI agents is making the marginal cost of analysis zero. Though still early, data engineering and analysis tasks - once done solely by humans - can now increasingly be achieved with AI agents in real time. In mid-market and enterprise companies it takes weeks or months to ingest and transform data into personalized reports. Shifting human work to code automates analytics and reporting at the same time. What used to take months, can now take minutes.

The analysis moat is shifting to data stack aggregators

As AI takes over human tasks in the analysis stack, value and defensibility shift from owning components of data pipelines to integrating them. This commoditizes them by shifting the ‘hard & valuable thing’ from building parts of the data stack to building the experience to interact with it.

The new standard in the data experience will be analytics aggregators

The new experience for non-technical users to work with data is… new. Instead of building for someone that needs to wrangle data, we’re building for someone that wants to understand how to increase revenue, discovery efficiencies, and cut costs.

The buyer shifts from data teams to decision makers

This also creates the decision maker as a new buyer and user of analysis tools. The prior generation of analysis tools succeeded by selling to data teams by making it easier to perform data work. However, moving data tasks to AI creates a new opportunity to build data experiences for decisions makers.

The new standards in data experience are analytics aggregators

Breadcrumb is our bet on what the new data aggregation experiences feels like. It’s our mission to build the simplest and most intelligent analysis platform. From when GenAI was first introduced, the Breadcrumb team has been focused on exploring what this new experience could be. We’re constantly iterating and improving our product. We are among the first to integrate new technologies into user friendly experiences.

Thanks for reading about some of the dynamics shaping Breadcrumb’s evolution. We feel we are riding a wave that is many times larger than ourselves. We’re grateful to be on this journey where we can build our life’s work. Join us. Try Breadcrumb. Give us feedback. We are stronger together.

Marcus

Founder, Breadcrumb