# Andy Cotgreave | A conversation on Dashboards and the Future of BI

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2025-12-15
- **Format:** Video · 61 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Data visualisation, Industry trends, AI & ML
- **Tools:** Alteryx; Databricks; Power BI; Sigma; Snowflake; Tableau (ai, pulse, server); ThoughtSpot
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/andy-cotgreave--a-conversation-on-dashboards-and-the-future-of-bi
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0YI9Y5vlOc

I sit down with Andy Cotgreave to trace his winding path into data visualisation, the story behind his two dashboard books, and where business intelligence is heading. We dig into consumption-based pricing, the cost of curiosity, the role of LLMs and semantic layers, and whether the data analyst role is being reshaped into something more like a curator.

## Key takeaways

- Becoming a strong data analyst means acquiring a spread of skills - coding, database knowledge, project management, communication, writing and creativity - rather than going deep on just one.
- Consumption and query-based pricing risks raising the 'cost of curiosity', pushing analysts to dumb down dashboards to save money rather than designing the best asset for end users.
- Generative BI only works on top of a genuinely good semantic layer, which almost no organisation has invested in because it is hard and businesses constantly change.
- Measuring a dashboard's value is still largely qualitative - akin to valuing the toilets or tyres in a business - and remains one of the hardest unsolved problems in analytics.
- LLMs infer from past behaviour and cannot predict genuinely new business questions, so human analysts shift towards being curators of trusted data, semantics and context.

## Chapters

- 0:00 Introducing Andy Cotgreave
- 1:41 Andy's winding career path
- 5:33 Discovering Tableau in 2007
- 7:53 The evolution of evangelism
- 13:58 Writing the Big Book of Dashboards
- 17:23 Production and image headaches
- 19:46 The second book and a framework
- 23:54 Consumption pricing and dashboard cost
- 27:26 The cost of curiosity
- 31:44 LLMs, AI and semantic layers
- 37:51 Analyst versus engineer roles
- 39:59 Measuring the value of a dashboard

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/andy-cotgreave--a-conversation-on-dashboards-and-the-future-of-bi

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena