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In the last decade, business intelligence (BI) and data visualization have grown into a critical business functions. However, while BI and data viz tools have become increasingly prevalent, most organizations continue to struggle to extract timely and actionable insights from them.

The problem isn’t adoption or access. Companies recognize the need. It’s both performance and capability. Today’s business intelligence platforms are still constrained by architectural limitations inherited from a different era: one where data came from a handful of sources and changed infrequently.

In contrast, today’s data environment encompasses massive data warehouses, event streaming, real-time IoT sensors, and constantly shifting inputs that must be aggregated, enriched, pre-processed, and understood on timelines ranging from days to milliseconds.

Co-founder and CEO of Row64.

The goal of BI itself hasn’t changed, but the sheer volume, variety, and velocity of data combined with the speed of today’s business, require BI to evolve from outdated architecture to dynamic, decision-centric systems capable of delivering what is now being referred to as “decision intelligence.”

The focus today isn’t just on what happened, but on what’s happening now and what to do about it. Still, the category’s underlying technical limitations remain. Most platforms struggle to process massive datasets at speed or deliver seamless, interactive user experiences, which are barriers that prevent organizations from fully capitalizing on their data.

To understand where BI is headed and why these challenges persist, it is helpful to examine an industry and technology that have already solved them: gaming.

Why Video Games Are The Right Analogy

Modern video games process massive volumes of data in real time, responding instantly to user input and delivering immersive, visual experiences at 30 to 120 frames per second. That level of responsiveness was once out of reach.

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Games had to limit visual complexity and responsiveness due to hardware and software constraints. The leap to today’s fluid, real-time environments didn’t come from rethinking gameplay. It came from rethinking how data, graphics, and compute power interact.

The games industry has long been a test bed for innovation. Computer graphics, scanning, hardware acceleration with CPUs and GPUs, game engines—all of these technologies were pushed forward by the demands of gamers and the pursuit of more compelling experiences.

That tech has consistently spilled over into other industries. AI is no different. Rudimentary AI appeared as early as 1951 in a checkers program, and by the late ’70s and early ’80s, video games were using distinct movement patterns and in-game events powered by basic AI.

Today, we see the results of that technological evolution everywhere, including business intelligence. Graphics across industries are far superior to what they once were. AI can now analyze billions of records and detect trends in milliseconds. While human oversight remains critical for decision-making, AI dramatically accelerates the process of surfacing key insights.

And yet, BI hasn’t fully made the leap that video games have. Legacy BI systems are still tied to outdated architectures, forcing enterprises to analyze only subsets of data and make decisions based on historical information. Reports can still take hours or days to run and often need technical experts just to prepare visualizations or enable queries.

The result? Users are stuck waiting for someone else to extract the insight, while the business moves on.

The Latency Gap

Legacy BI platforms were built around batch processing and static dashboards. That might have worked in an era when business and data volumes were manageable. Now, organizations generate an estimated 328.77 million terabytes of data per day globally, and they need answers in the moment, not hours or days later.

During a cyberattack, for example, companies can’t afford to wait even minutes to respond. In retail, imagine a company that can instantly identify and respond to regional trends, rather than waiting days for analysis.

And in critical infrastructure, power, water, and telecom providers can get customers back online faster by visually exploring millions of assets—down to every tower, line, or pipe—in a high-speed, real-time environment. Rapid insight isn’t a luxury; it’s the current baseline for competitive advantage and resilience.

Yet most BI tools still require users to slice and dice data into smaller subsets just to get performance that doesn’t time out their tools. And even then, those views are static. Change the scope or ask a different question, and you’re stuck waiting for another query cycle.

That’s where the analogy to gaming is powerful. Today’s BI solutions are like playing a “turn-based” game that pauses every time you move. Meanwhile, business users expect information to be fast, visual, and interactive because that’s how they engage with data in every other part of their digital lives.

The dashboards they rely on at work often fall short, as they are unable to keep up with the scale and speed of the modern enterprise.

This latency isn’t always a software issue. In many cases, it’s a byproduct of data infrastructure that can’t support real-time computation, instant visual rendering on massive datasets, or aggregate data from multiple sources.

These limitations force teams to work from static summaries or heavily curated data subsets. Analysts spend valuable time down-sampling data and inferring patterns rather than observing them as they unfold.

From Static Dashboards to Streaming Interfaces

Decision intelligence promises to move us beyond a reactive posture and into proactive action. But to deliver on that promise, BI systems need to operate more like live-service environments than static repositories.

Just as games provide real-time feedback (“twitch”) when a player moves, jumps, or issues a command, BI platforms must be able to update visuals instantly as users slice, dice, or drill into data.

That means pushing visual and data processing capabilities closer to the hardware layer, utilizing hardware-accelerated architectures and powerful, low-overhead APIs that can stream and visualize data at interactive frame rates — every 30 milliseconds, not every five seconds — just like most modern games.

Responsiveness matters not just for user experience. It enables confident decisions in high-pressure environments. When users can interact with large datasets in real time, they ask better questions, explore more scenarios, and arrive at insights faster. Exploration becomes a continuous loop of input and feedback, much like what happens in a game environment.

This level of performance requires hardware-accelerated infrastructure capable of streaming, analyzing, and visualizing data at scale, without reducing the fidelity of that data. That’s the gap most BI systems haven’t crossed.

BI as a Live Service

Most games today operate as live services. They evolve, receive updates in real time, and respond to players dynamically. BI needs to make that same transition, from a reporting tool to a responsive, service-oriented platform.

A true live-service BI platform goes beyond displaying historical metrics. It continuously ingests new data, responds instantly to user input, and updates visualizations in real time. When built this way, BI becomes a living layer of the business: always current, always interactive, and always aligned to what decision-makers need right now.

This means embracing features such as real-time data streaming and interfaces that evolve in tandem with the business. It also means rethinking performance standards. If a visualization takes minutes to load, the insight it contains may already be stale or lost entirely.

Getting There

Bringing BI into this new era of decision intelligence takes more than flashy dashboards or real-time charts. It demands a complete overhaul of the data pipeline—from ingestion and transformation to rendering and interaction. Hardware-accelerated performance plays a critical role, but equally important is the architectural mindset that prioritizes responsiveness and interactivity.

It also requires companies to thoroughly examine their data ecosystems. BI tools are only as effective as the systems they sit on top of. Without rationalizing siloed systems or investing in infrastructure that can support real-time throughput, even the most advanced visual tools will fall short.

AI will also play a growing role, surfacing patterns and insights too complex or subtle for humans to spot on their own, especially as enterprises shift from reactive to proactive decision-making.

As enterprise teams become more data-literate and digitally fluent, expectations around speed and interactivity will continue to rise. Business intelligence must evolve to meet these expectations, enabling proactive decision-making.

The next generation of BI won’t look like the static reports of the past. It will resemble the games we already play. Fast. Visual. Immersive. And responsive to every change in the environment.

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Co-founder and CEO of Row64.