This Is Generative Intelligence: A New Standard For Enterprise AI

I’ve spent my career at the intersection of transformation and technology. But few moments have felt as urgent—or as full of possibility—as the one we’re in now. Every executive I talk to is under pressure to “figure out AI” or be replaced by it. Most aren’t sure where to start. The rest are worried they’re already behind.

I joined Sigma because the leadership team here believes the conversation about AI is missing something critical: trust. Artificial intelligence fails on its own, but combined with human intelligence, business intelligence, and the data infrastructure layer, they connect with something far greater. We call this generative intelligence.

Generative intelligence is a new way to think about how people and machines work together. It bridges generative artificial intelligence and business intelligence by carefully auditing the artificial. It brings together the best of modern language models and classic data practices—like governance, transparency, and traceability—to help people make better decisions. This isn’t smoke and mirrors. It’s practical, grounded, and open by design.

It starts with a simple idea: AI should work with you, not for you.

Why now?

Because the moment demands it. Over the past three years, generative AI has gone from novelty to necessity. But most tools on the market treat it as a bolt-on. A prompt box layered on top of brittle workflows. That approach might produce flashy demos, but it doesn’t hold up under pressure. Leaders need more than AI for AI’s sake. They need results they can explain, reproduce, and build on.

That’s where our generative intelligence interfaces like Ask Sigma come in.

Ask Sigma doesn’t just give you a number—it walks you through how it got there. You can tweak it, ask follow-up questions, and use what you find to do real work. And it does this inside the same governed platform your data team already trusts. That combination—of transparency, explainability, and seamless integration with your warehouse—is what makes generative intelligence possible.

We built Sigma to make data accessible to everyone. We built Ask Sigma to make AI trustworthy, flexible, and useful. AI, when implemented correctly, can unlock even greater levels of data accessibility, insight, and impact. Our platform sits directly on top of your cloud data warehouse—Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, you name it. That means your data stays secure, governed, and up to date. And because Sigma is model-agnostic, you’re never locked into one LLM. As your infrastructure evolves, your AI evolves with it.

What traditional BI couldn’t do

For years, BI has focused on dashboards and KPIs. These tools surface what happened, but they rarely help you understand why it happened or what to do next. They’re designed for consumption, not collaboration. And they leave most people—especially outside the data team—staring at a static chart and wondering what comes next.

Generative intelligence opens up the rest of the warehouse. You can ask a question in natural language and see the steps behind the answer. You can dig deeper, build on it, and explore what the data really means—without losing trust in the process.

That’s exactly how Dutch Pet uses Sigma. Their team—everyone from executives to on-staff veterinarians—relies on Ask Sigma to explore data in real time, ask follow-up questions, and surface insights they can act on immediately. Whether they’re calculating complex vet payouts, spotting product trends, or improving telemedicine operations, Ask Sigma gives them a trusted, explainable starting point. It’s not just faster. It’s smarter, more collaborative, and deeply embedded in how their business runs. You can learn more about how they and other Sigma customers use generative intelligence during our May 20 Product Showcase.

The power of collaboration

At its core, generative intelligence is collaborative. Generative intelligence happens when people and technology move together—each one improving the other. The AI doesn’t dictate. It suggests. It learns from your input. And because Sigma is built on spreadsheets and SQL, every interaction is grounded in familiar tools that business users already know how to navigate.

Generative intelligence happens when people and technology move together—each one improving the other.

This isn’t about replacing analysts. It’s about empowering more people to think like analysts. It’s about giving every user the ability to ask better questions, see the full context, and take meaningful action—without having to write code or wait for a ticket to get resolved.

What’s at risk if you get AI wrong

Companies that rush to adopt AI without a strong foundation risk more than sunk costs. They risk trust. Trust in the data. Trust in the process. Trust in the outcome. When you can’t explain how an answer was generated, you can’t defend the decision that followed. And when AI is sprinkled across siloed SaaS tools, you lose control, increase costs, and create a governance nightmare.

Generative intelligence is the antidote to AI sprawl. It consolidates your logic, data, and AI workflows in one governed platform. It scales with you. And it keeps your team in control.

Planting the flag

Everyone wants AI that actually works—reliably, explainably, and at scale. But most solutions today either box you into a single model, fragment your workflows, or generate outputs you can’t trust.

Generative intelligence is our answer to that problem. It’s not an overlay or a gimmick. It’s a rethinking of how work gets done—with data, with context, and with humans in the loop.

Sigma is leading this shift. Because we’re built for governed collaboration. Because we’re model-agnostic. And because we’ve spent years making data accessible to the people who need it most.

This is the new foundation for AI in the enterprise—and the beginning of what comes next.

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