#262 Self-Service Business Intelligence with Sameer Al-Sakran, CEO at Metabase

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We’re often caught chasing the dream of “self-serve” data—a place where data empowers stakeholders to answer their questions without a data expert at every turn. But what does it take to reach that point? How do you shape tools that empower teams to explore and act on data without the usual bottlenecks? And with the growing presence of natural language tools and AI, is true self-service within reach, or is there still more to the journey?

Sameer Al-Sakran is the CEO at Metabase, a low-code self-service analytics company. Sameer has a background in both data science and data engineering so he's got a practitioner's perspective as well as executive insight. Previously, he was CTO at Expa and Blackjet, and the founder of SimpleHadoop and Adopilot.

In the episode, Richie and Sameer explore self-serve analytics, the evolution of data tools, GenAI vs AI agents, semantic layers, the challenges of implementing self-serve analytics, the problem with data-driven culture, encouraging efficiency in data teams, the parallels between UX and data projects, exciting trends in analytics, and much more.

Links Mentioned in the Show:

• Metabase
• Connect with Sameer
• Articles from Metabase on jargon, information budgets, analytics mistakes, and data model mistakes
• Course: Introduction to Data Culture
• Related Episode: Towards Self-Service Data Engineering with Taylor Brown, Co-Founder and COO at Fivetran
• Rewatch Sessions from RADAR: Forward Edition

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