Goodbye Dashboards: Agents Deliver Answers, Not Just Reports
When you wake up in the morning, do you say, “Let me go open my ERP?” Of course not. You think about what you need to get done: Close a deal, check customer churn, prep for a board meeting. Yet the enterprise software you use forces you to answer those questions by logging into siloed applications with clunky dashboards and rigid workflows.
That era is over. In fact, it never made sense to begin with.
We’ve traditionally built software around boxed-in systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and human capital management (HCM), each with its own interface, rules and limitations. The result is a maze of data silos and “swivel-chair” integrations that force users to adapt to the rules of software instead of software adapting to their needs.
In the age of AI, this is no longer necessary. It’s time to stop thinking about software and start thinking about agents: intelligent, contextual, invisible assistants that understand our goals, orchestrate the data and take action on our behalf.
Some people think agents will obviate the need for applications entirely by aggregating the data we need in one place, regardless of its source. I disagree. Applications won’t disappear — they’ll dissolve into the background, surfacing only when required and adapting to context. The agent, not the application, becomes the new interface.
AI Is the Only UI
We’re entering a world where AI becomes the primary user interface for the way we operate. The shift is already happening. A recent Bain survey found that 80% of search users now rely on “zero-click” results in at least 40% of their searches. No more digging through web pages trying to find an answer to their question; AI surfaces it right at the top.
In an agentic world, there are no more dashboards with 30 filters. There’s no more flipping between windows to piece together insights by copying and pasting snippets into a spreadsheet. Self-service analytics is about making informed decisions, not just building another report.
Instead, you tell your agent to show you which deals are at risk this quarter, explain why churn is rising or rank your regions by customer lifetime value. AI finds the answers, analyzes the factors that contribute to them and recommends courses of action. Agents become dedicated analysts who understand your unique needs and interests. There’s no SQL or weeklong waits for the business intelligence team to gather the data you need — just answers when you need them, where you need them.
Goodbye One-Size-Fits-All Workflows
This isn’t about incremental user interface enhancements. It’s about eliminating the existing UI altogether. Today’s enterprise systems rely on predefined workflows defined by resource limitations and software design: Submit a request, wait for approvals, trigger a report, run a process. It’s all very orderly — and very inefficient.
Serial workflows will be replaced by agent-to-agent orchestration in which agents interact with users and each other. Your finance agent will communicate with your supply chain agent to secure materials and contact your service agent to notify customers about availability. This will all occur in real time, with humans involved only when necessary.
Workflow automation becomes autonomous coordination. Emerging multiagent communication standards, such as the Model Context Protocol and Agent2Agent Protocol, will enable agents to be seamlessly embedded across environments, allowing them to take actions when called upon.
The enterprise stack isn’t going away, but the way we use it will be radically different.
The End of Apps?
A debate has recently sprung up over whether agents will render traditional applications obsolete. Let’s be clear: The debate isn’t about obsolescence, but evolution. The business logic and data managed by applications will remain essential, but the user experience will be transformed. Agents orchestrate, applications execute.
What will disappear is the notion that systems must interact with users directly. We will still need systems of record, but we need to rethink the experience around them.
You shouldn’t log into your ERP. Your ERP should log into you. It should surface insights when churn spikes, revenue deviates or when inventory runs low, without requiring you to ask.
Think of the analogy of automotive navigation devices. Twenty years ago, you had to type your destination into a dedicated GPS receiver, which cost several hundred dollars. Today, navigation is embedded in your smartphone and used by every application that requires it. The need for navigation hasn’t gone away, but the function has become integrated into our day-to-day routine — inherently invisible and intelligent.
Traditional Dashboards Are Outdated
In my industry, business intelligence, people talk a lot about dashboards. Years ago, we convinced ourselves that “self-service BI” meant being able to build your own custom dashboards, and vendors have obliged with a wide range of tools to facilitate this. The result is that some businesses I’ve encountered have hundreds of thousands of dashboards, most of which nobody uses.
Traditional dashboards are outdated. They show you that numbers are going up or down, but don’t tell you why. Agents can do that.
AI-augmented dashboards provide real-time, interactive and drillable insights, along with anomaly detection and automated AI summaries. These AI-powered features surface relevant insights proactively, can be embedded in business applications and support business and technical users. A holistic intelligence platform coordinates agents, AI-augmented dashboards and embedded analytics to deliver actionable, contextual insights when users need them.
Smart alerts, proactive insights and contextual nudges will be the new currency of business intelligence. You don’t have to log in, set thresholds and manage alerts. Agents will learn the metrics and trends that matter to you and alert you when something demands your attention.
From Analysts to AI Stewards
What does this mean for your people? A lot.
We’ve turned analysts into manual report generators, cranking out charts that no one reads and managing backlogs that never seem to end. AI stewards will be strategic advisors who are tuned into the nuances of your business. The analyst’s new role will be to curate data, coach AI and amplify business value, rather than generating another pie chart. Not everyone will be comfortable making this switch, but all will be better off for it.
Trust, Not Hype
None of this will be possible without trust. Agents that hallucinate, misfire or violate business policies will do more harm than good. The winners in this new era will be the software companies that build trust into every layer of their products. Data governance, model transparency, access control, auditing and explainability must be embedded into the DNA of every offering. The winners in this new era will be the vendors who treat trust not as a feature, but as an architectural principle.
The Bottom Line
We’re looking at the biggest shift in enterprise software since the dawn of the cloud. The ways we’ll interact with software five years from now will be entirely different from the way we do so today. The companies that embrace this shift in the early stages will be the leaders.
Stop thinking about software. Start thinking about what’s possible when intelligence is everywhere, interfaces are invisible and every employee has a tireless, trustworthy agent by their side. In the future, you won’t open applications but use intelligence that works for you at the point of greatest impact. That’s what software is supposed to do.
