Is AstroBee a Business Intelligence Tool?

The term “Business Intelligence” was first used in 1865 by a writer named Richard Millar Devens to describe how a 19th‑century banker used data to gain a competitive advantage.

Etymology is funny. When someone asks us if AstroBee is a BI tool, I think Richard Millar Devens would say yes. AstroBee is a tool for using data to gain a competitive advantage. It combines agentic AI with human business context, drawing on both the data itself and the people who know how to operationalize it.

However, when a venture analyst or someone at Gartner asks us if AstroBee is a BI tool, I think I have to say no. Sadly, in the 90s, when Gartner and others started defining a concrete market category called Business Intelligence, those words lost their imaginative power. Modern BI looks like Tableau, Looker, Power BI, and Mode. Snowflake is not a “business intelligence” tool in the analyst’s eyes, even though Snowflake has become a critical part of using data to gain a competitive advantage. Over time, analysts narrowed “business intelligence” to only the layer that connects to clean, useful data assets in order to surface insights directly to users.

Two Huge Steps Before “BI”

Before dashboards can even begin serving useful information, there’s a ton of prep work to transform enterprise data into a workable form.

1. Data Integration: First, all data from useful source systems, including event data, CRM records, payment history, and everything in between, is pulled into one place. This means data scientists toiling to gather an understanding of their data architecture, then write ETL pipelines, schedule batch jobs, and monitor for any issues.
2. Data Transformation: Taking that raw data and working it into tables ready for analysis involves endless battles with join logic, unit conversions, inconsistent measures, and the eternal debate over what exactly “active customer” means. Transformation is where business logic becomes code, and where the smallest mistakes silently poison every downstream metric.

Data teams routinely spend huge chunks of their time here, wrangling data into workable form.

Where AstroBee Lives

AstroBee does its magic in these two unsung steps.

• Integration on Autopilot: AstroBee connects to your data warehouse where you’ve pooled raw data. Our AI agents take a scan of metadata, including column types, schemas, and labels. They can then infer relationships between various tables, identify keys, and write joins where appropriate.
• Transformation to Encode Business Logic: Instead of ad-hoc SQL scripts, AstroBee learns the mapping between “orders,” “subscriptions,” and “MRR” by observing data patterns and asking lightweight validation questions. It identifies the delta between its understanding of raw source data and the business logic needed to answer common BI queries. It then closes that delta and dilutes that logic into an ontology, or an auto-governed semantic layer that BI tools or AstroBee itself can query directly.

In other words, AstroBee uses a team of AI agents to generate clean, useful data assets that conventional BI tools consume. It plays the role that data engineers and analysts have played for decades, often begrudgingly, so they can focus on predictive modeling, experimentation, and optimization.

A Category that Doesn’t Exist…Yet

Would you call such a tool a “business intelligence” tool? Someone with the creative capacity of Richard Devens in 1865 certainly would, as AstroBee enhances a business’s capability to use data to gain a competitive advantage.

An analyst in 2025, fluent in the many data products that proliferate the market, would certainly say no. They’d need to splice together key pieces of Data Integration, Data Transformation, and Business Intelligence to fully describe AstroBee’s end‑to‑end workflow. The old boxes don’t fit the new shape.

So, how do we answer the question, “Is AstroBee a Business Intelligence Tool?”

Kinda, but also no. We’ll figure out what the right label for it is, and in the meantime, if your team is interested in trying out true end-to-end self-serve analytics, we’d love to hear from you. Follow our progress on socials (LinkedIn and X) and reach out to hello@astrobee.ai to say hi.