The most valuable dashboards often lead to another question.
Which region drove the increase in sales?
How did that compare with last year?
Which products contributed most to the change?
What started as a simple question about a dashboard has become a deeper analytical exploration. But traditionally, answering that next question can mean searching through other report pages, finding a different dashboard or asking an analyst or report designer to create an entirely new view of the data.
That creates a gap between curiosity and insight.
For business users viewing reports in SAS® Visual Analytics, SAS® Viya® Copilot helps close that gap. Instead of being limited to the questions a report was originally designed to answer, users can ask their own questions about the underlying data and explore the answers instantly.
Let’s explore how Viya Copilot helps report viewers move beyond the dashboard and discover the insights that matter to them.
When the dashboard sparks curiosity
Reports and dashboards are designed to answer important business questions. They bring together the right data, metrics and visualizations to help users understand what is happening. In fact, the most useful dashboards should lead to new questions.
A dashboard might show overall sales performance, but a user might want to understand how sales changed in a particular region. A report might show profit by product, but the next question could be how those products performed over time. Or a user might want to see a familiar measure broken down by a category that isn’t currently displayed.
Traditionally, answering these questions requires another step. Users might need to search through the report for an existing visual, navigate to another dashboard or ask another team to create a new report.
Viya Copilot introduces a more direct path.
When the next answer isn’t already in the report
When viewing a report, users can ask Viya Copilot questions about the underlying data using natural language. Copilot interprets the question, queries the available data and returns the result as a visualization.
For example, a user might ask:
- “Show me sales for the Northeast region.”
- “How did revenue change over the last 12 months?”
- “Break profit down by product category.”
- “Which regions had the highest sales last quarter?”
Copilot can use existing measures and columns from the report’s data to answer these questions, applying the appropriate categories, measures, filters or ranks based on what the user asked.
This means users no longer have to search through report pages for the right chart or wait for another team to build a new view.
They can ask the question and explore the answer immediately.
From predefined views to self-service exploration
A report author’s job is to create a focused analytical experience. That often means selecting the most important metrics, dimensions and visualizations for a particular audience.
But no report can anticipate every question a user might have. And it shouldn’t have to.
That’s where conversational analytics can extend the value of a report.
With Viya Copilot, users aren’t limited to the views that were originally included in the report. They can describe what they want to see and Copilot can create a new visualization to help answer the question.
This gives report viewers more room to explore without requiring report authors to build every possible analysis in advance. Business users can explore beyond the predefined dashboard while still working within the report’s analytical context.
The result is a more dynamic experience: the report provides the starting point, and the user’s questions determine where the analysis goes next.
Understanding how Copilot answered your question
Natural-language questions make analytics more accessible, but users also need to understand how their questions were translated into analytical results.
Viya Copilot provides transparency into how it interpreted a question and built the resulting visualization. By expanding the information pop-up, users can see which categories and measures Copilot selected from the available data, as well as the filters or ranks applied based on the question.
This transparency is especially important when a question requires a calculation that doesn’t already exist in the report. Copilot can generate new expressions on the fly to create ad-hoc measures, such as aggregated or periodic calculations. For example, a report might contain sales and profit, but a user might want to understand profit margin. Or they might want to compare a measure across time using a periodic calculation.
When Copilot creates a new calculation, the expression logic is available alongside the visualization, allowing users to validate how the result was calculated.
Whether Copilot uses existing measures and columns or generates a new expression, users can see how their question translates into the analytical result. This helps make conversational analytics not only more accessible but also more transparent and trustworthy.
More freedom to ask, without giving up control
Self-service exploration doesn’t mean giving users ungoverned access to data.
Governance remains part of that experience. The ability to explore beyond predefined views still operates within boundaries established by the report designer.
The report designer determines which data Viya Copilot can access when responding to a user’s questions about the report. By default, only data items assigned to objects in the report are available to the viewer.
From there, report designers can choose to allow viewers to access any data item in the report’s data source, even when that data item is not explicitly used in the report. Or they can disable the SAS Viya Copilot pane completely for report viewers.
That creates an important balance: viewers gain more freedom to follow their questions, while report designers and organizations retain control over the data available to Copilot.
From report viewing to insight discovery
A dashboard doesn’t have to anticipate every question its viewers might ask. It can provide the context, trusted data and starting point, while giving users room to follow the questions that emerge.
Business users can move from consuming the analysis created for them to exploring the questions that matter to them, while remaining within the analytical and governance boundaries established by the report designer.
With SAS Viya Copilot, the report becomes less of a fixed destination and more of a starting point for exploration. The dashboard provides the starting point. The questions users ask determine where the analysis goes next.
