Stop Wasting Your Data Team's Time

The Ad Hoc Data Problem

One of the biggest challenges for data teams isn’t building infrastructure, it’s handling ad hoc requests.

I was talking to a VP of Data recently, and he said something that really stuck with me:

“We’re working on a huge data project — merging data across business units, setting up clean models, building dashboards — but the business side keeps firing off questions. We’re stuck writing SQL and exporting CSVs instead of focusing on strategic work.”

This is the quiet tax on data teams that no one talks about.

Most companies have data pipelines. They have clean models. They have a BI tool like Power BI or Tableau sitting on top of everything. But the business side still isn’t getting the answers they need when they need them. Why?

Because business teams don’t know the schemas, the table structures, or how to write SQL. They just want answers.

So the data team ends up doing two jobs:
1. Building long-term strategic data products that can drive business growth.
2. Responding to a constant stream of “quick questions” that pull them off that work.

The VP I spoke with described how they’re starting to merge customer data across business units for the first time. The goal is obvious: better cross-selling, higher sales. But once that project is done, the business side is going to start asking questions like:

• “Which mortgage holders are most likely to buy life insurance?”
• “What’s the average conversion rate for customers over 60?”
• “How do these two customer segments overlap?”

And here’s the kicker: they don’t have a system for answering those questions quickly. Right now, someone has to pull a query from Snowflake, format the data, maybe clean it up in Excel, and then send it back. If the request is even slightly off, they’ll have to go back and tweak the query.

It’s not sustainable.

The problem isn’t the data infrastructure, it’s the interface. Business teams need to be able to ask questions in plain English and get accurate answers back instantly. That’s how you unlock the full value of data.

This is why I’m so excited about building in the ad hoc analytics space. The ability to query structured data with natural language isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s a game-changer. And frankly, it’s where business intelligence tools have historically fallen short.

Power BI tried to solve this years ago, but it required so much context and metadata that by the time you set it up, you could’ve just written a thousand queries manually.

The future isn’t more dashboards, it’s smarter interfaces. If a sales leader can just ask a question like, “What’s the average time to close for customers over 60?” and get a clean, accurate answer back without waiting on the data team... that changes everything.

The companies that figure this out first will have a massive competitive advantage. And the data teams that don’t have to waste time on manual SQL queries? They’ll finally be able to focus on the work that actually matters.

If you’ve experienced this at your company, I’d love to hear about it.