Iris: Your AI Analyst for Data-Driven Decisions

Jul 10, 2025

Iris: Your AI Analyst for Data-Driven Decisions

Today, we’re launching Iris: your AI analyst for smarter, faster business decisions. For business leaders, Iris brings data-backed reasoning to every decision. For data teams, it scales the thinking of a top analyst across the entire organization.

Despite billions invested in data tools, most companies still struggle to turn data into impact. Dashboards answer simple questions. BI tools go unused. And in too many rooms, gut instinct still trumps insight.

Iris changes that. It moves at the speed of gut instinct — but with the precision of an expert analyst. From healthcare to hospitality, B2C to B2B, teams use Iris to drive results across marketing, operations, recruiting, and strategy.

The Fundamental Bottleneck: Cost of Insights

We’re not the first to recognize the problem — or to see AI as the key to bridging the gap between business users and meaningful, data-backed insight. At the core of this challenge is the high cost of generating insights. Every question triggers a complex, costly chain of reasoning, modeling, and engineering — often involving multiple teams which effectively adds up to thousands of dollars. As a result, insights are reserved for strategic decisions, while day-to-day choices still run on instinct. Dashboards have claimed to scale insights for everyone - that claim works on billboards, but has not worked in reality. Data never quite got its democracy. To truly democratize insights,  we need to cut the cost of insight by 1,000x and the time to insight needs to be near instant.

Rethinking the Stack For 1000x Cheaper Insights

Iris reimagines the shape of the solution. First, it solves business problems and provides actionable insights with a high degree of accuracy. Iris accuracy matches that of a seasoned human analyst. Second, Iris is the only product that is built with the frontline business user in mind – it is directly usable by a non-technical user without needing to understand the intricacies of data. Finally, Iris time to value is less than a day – no complex setup.

At its core, Iris combines two critical capabilities: business-grounded reasoning and accuracy enforced by strong data guardrails. It explores data with the flexibility of AI while staying anchored in verifiable truth. This dual requirement — deep reasoning and high accuracy — makes the problem uniquely hard, and one that existing solutions rarely solve well.

Iris Context

To enable smarter, real-time decisions, Iris introduces a new layer to map business speak to the data, as it exists in the warehouse - Iris Context. Traditional semantic layers built for this purpose are static and rigid, built for dashboards, not AI agents. Iris Context is different:

  • Automated, not manual – No more hand-curated logic or constant upkeep. Its a self-learning system that stays fresh, without the busywork.
  • Flexible but governed – Adapts to new questions and use cases, while still maintaining control and consistency.
  • Rich in real-world concepts – Goes beyond just metrics and dimensions to include meaningful business logic, like “last-minute bookings” or “repeat guests.”
  • Built for AI reasoning, not reporting – Powers agents that can think, explore, and generate insights (not just display charts).
  • Dynamic, not static – Evolves as your business changes, surfacing what matters most in the moment.

With Iris Context, data becomes truly usable, connecting raw information to real-world action, across every decision.

This context layer enables Iris to reason through business problems, breaking them down, iterating, and synthesizing conclusions. It speaks the language of the business, so users don’t have to translate their needs into data queries. Iris brings the analysis to the user, not the other way around.

This layer plays an important role in delivering a high level of accuracy that is essential for business critical insights. The deterministic application of guardrails to an engine that reasons is the essence of Iris' technology.

Finally, Iris eliminates the need for expensive, dashboard specific manual modeling which drastically reduces the cost and time to insights. Traditional tools struggle in fast-moving businesses where data and context constantly change. Every shift in strategy or methodology requires time-consuming updates to models and semantic layers. Iris removes this burden. It automatically infers business context in minutes by analyzing metadata and query patterns in your warehouse. As users ask more questions, Iris learns and improves. Just like a human analyst, it will continuously adapt as the business evolves.

Text to Sql Tools Are a Non-starter

Text-to-SQL tools built on BI semantic layers or models inside a BI tool don’t reduce the cost of insights. They are based on the assumption that data is static and users must do the work of speaking in a way that the data is organized. They require the investment of time and effort in building these models which is where the cost becomes prohibitive. Next, they lack the reasoning needed to tackle real business problems stated in everyday work speak that do not have any explicit data intent. These “talk to your data” solutions miss the real issue: business questions rarely start with metrics. They start with goals like improving ROI, choosing the right blog topic, or optimizing a process. The true gap is between these real-world use cases and the raw data. Closing this gap requires more than figuring out the SQL to write for a question stated in natural language. It requires the kind of reasoning a skilled analyst would bring. That’s what Iris delivers.

The Times They Are a-changin'

There have been pivotal moments in the history of computing where the after looked nothing like the before. We are living one in a pivotal moment now: the future of business insights is 1000x cheaper, 1000x faster.  Our customers like Twiddy, Observe.ai, and Veronica Beard are reaping the benefits of economies of speed: getting insights in minutes instead of weeks, at a fraction of the cost. This 1000x reduction doesn’t just speed up decisions; it sparks a cultural shift where data becomes part of everyday work, empowering teams across the board.

Twiddy, a tech-forward vacation rental marketplace, now uses Iris across guest and owner services teams, work order operations,  marketing, and company-wide strategic planning.  As CEO Ross Twiddy puts it:

"We’ve always believed in the power of data. Iris is helping us build a culture where everyone uses it and speaks the same language."

Welcome to the future of how work will get done - Let’s get you started !