Enterprise Wide Search 39: Ben Mathew - Why AI Won’t Replace Business Intelligence

In this episode, co-hosts Emma McGrattan and Ole Olesen-Bagneux sit down with Ben Mathew, General Manager of Business Intelligence at Actian and former GM of Jaspersoft, to explore how business intelligence is evolving in the age of AI.

With more than 20 years in enterprise software and two decades of experience in the BI space, Ben looks back at how business intelligence evolved from static reporting to analytics. And why, despite decades of investment, the promise of truly self-service BI has remained largely unfulfilled.

Together, they explore:

• How BI evolved from hindsight to insight, and increasingly, foresight

• Why self-service BI has struggled to deliver on its original promise

• How natural language and AI could finally make analytics accessible to a much broader audience

• Why probabilistic AI cannot replace the deterministic outputs enterprises still need

• How governance, trust, and auditability will shape the next generation of business intelligence

Ben also shares the story of Jaspersoft, from its open-source beginnings 25 years ago to its recent acquisition by Actian, and explains why he believes AI won't make BI smaller: it will make it more foundational.

🎧 Tune in for a conversation on the evolution of business intelligence, the impact of AI on analytics, and why the future may be less about replacing BI than finally delivering on its original promise.

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