The State of Self-Service and Automation Report

When self-service first gained traction, the focus was largely on analytics, giving business users easier access to data and visualization tools. Today, self-service extends across the entire data and analytics life cycle. Automation is central to this shift, with low-code and no-code platforms enabling citizen developers to create and manage data processes, improve quality, and ensure integrity—all critical to analytics—without heavy IT involvement. By expanding self-service, organizations can build a trusted foundation that empowers more people to work confidently with data.

Organizations continue to prioritize self service analytics as a way to accelerate decision-making and reduce IT bottlenecks. This trend is important to those organizations that want to move beyond spreadsheets and static dashboards to build an analytics culture. This is one in which insights are not confined to a centralized team, but instead are embedded in everyday workflows across departments. Self-service can reduce bottlenecks, accelerate time to insight, and foster greater collaboration between business and IT, with IT enabling and governing the environment
in the background.

Today, self-service is evolving beyond simple access and visualization to include more advanced capabilities. Solutions are now emerging that surface automated insights, guide users through the process of building predictive models, and embed machine learning within intuitive interfaces. Generative AI is further accelerating this shift by providing natural language interfaces for data—allowing users to ask questions, explore trends, and generate summaries without needing deep technical skills. These innovations lower the barrier to entry for advanced analytics and might
close the gap between data access and meaningful, self-service insight. In fact, the integration of generative AI into BI and AI tools may become the force that propels self-service to enterprise-wide capability.

Benefits of self-service include:
• Greater agility and collaboration. 
• Improved decision-making. 
• Employee empowerment.

Read the full report to learn more.