Data analytics company Starburst Data has launched Aida, an AI data assistant that lets business users query and analyse enterprise data in natural language, SiliconANGLE reported on April 14 local time.

Starburst CEO Justin Borgman (저스틴 보그만) said, "AI is the new business intelligence," and that it is meant to close the gap between the speed of business decision-making and the time it takes to build dashboards and reports.

That means executives have to wait for BI teams to build dashboards to get the answers they need, but business conditions can already have changed by then.

The company said Aida operates directly in distributed environments without moving or centralising data. Based on the open-source Apache Trino engine, it can access data in cloud storage, data lakes, warehouses and operational systems.

Starburst co-founder and vice president of AI Matt Fuller (매트 풀러) explained that it infers the meaning of a question, identifies the datasets that can answer it and then provides a response.

Starburst also pointed to limitations in existing BI tools. It shared internal data showing that 41 percent of customers spend more than 4 months building dashboards and that 72 percent of users bypass dashboards to export data to Excel and analyse it. Aida is designed so that when users ask questions in business language, the system interprets technical schemas through a "context layer" that links business terms to technical data structures.

Aida supports multiple large language models, allowing customers to choose models based on cost, performance and compliance requirements. It can also be deployed in on-premises and hybrid environments.

Starburst is positioning Aida as a complementary solution rather than a complete replacement for existing BI tools. Borgman said, "Dashboards will not disappear completely, but will remain in a more specialised and curated form." Starburst also plans to pursue integration with enterprise applications such as Slack, Jira and GitHub.