The AI in Business Podcast Building a Virtuous Cycle of Analytics in Global Enterprises - with Barry McCardel of Hex
10 snips
Mar 11, 2026 Barry McArdle, co-founder and CEO at Hex, builds collaborative data workspaces to bridge data science and business. He critiques dashboards, explores tightening feedback loops between questions and decision-grade insight, and discusses AI-augmented collaborative analysis. He emphasizes measuring data ROI by adoption and trust, rethinking analyst roles, and rolling out AI expert-first to build reliable context.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Dashboards Are Insufficient For True Data Drivenness
- Dashboards often raise more questions than answers and are poor endpoints for decision-making.
- Barry McArdle argues true data drivenness requires understanding predicate reasons and predicting outcomes, not just tracking lagging tiles on a dashboard.
Move Data Practitioners To Curatorial Deep Dives
- Shift data practitioners toward deep-dive, curatorial roles that build a compoundable corpus of context.
- Let experts discover and encode context so the broader org can self-serve and escalate novel questions to analysts.
Give Everyone Natural Language For Routine Questions
- Provide natural-language access for routine questions while reserving experts for complex analysis.
- Use AI-augmented self-serve for common queries and have analysts handle off-road, novel problems.