Using AI agents

Learn how to interact with AI agents in Lightdash and Slack

Core capabilities

AI agents in Lightdash allow you to:

• Ask questions in natural language - Simply type what you want to know about your data, like “What’s our total revenue by region?” or “Show me user growth over the last 6 months”
• Get instant visualizations - Receive bar charts, time series, and tables automatically generated based on your questions
• Explore interactively - Follow up with additional questions, drill down into specific data points, or request different chart types
• Maintain conversation context - AI agents remember your conversation history, so you can build on previous questions and refine your analysis
• Provide text-only responses - Get answers in natural language when visualizations aren’t needed
• Guide you to the right data - Direct you to the most relevant explores or tables for your questions
• Discover existing content - Find and share relevant charts and dashboards that have already been created in your project
• Generate complete dashboards - Create multiple related visualizations at once that tell a cohesive story about your data, perfect for executive summaries or thematic analyses
• Compare across time periods - Ask for month-over-month, year-over-year, or any custom period offset, and the agent adds a comparison column next to each metric automatically

As mentioned earlier, Lightdash agents use the semantic layer defined in your dbt models to understand your data structure, relationships, and business logic. This ensures that the AI generates accurate queries and visualizations based on your specific data context. So, when an Agent generates an answer, the output is a semantic query, not SQL! This means that you can easily swap between the conversational AI interface and the standard Lightdash exploration experience.

Asking about a chart or dashboard

You can launch an AI conversation with a chart or dashboard pre-loaded as context. From the resource’s ⋯ menu, click Ask AI Agent.

This opens a new tab on the new-thread page for your default agent. The chart or dashboard appears as a pinned context card above the input, and the agent treats it as the subject of the conversation.

Pinned context

• The pinned card stays visible above your message in the thread, so anyone reading later can tell what was being discussed.
• Click the pinned card to open the chart or dashboard in a new tab.
• The pinned context persists across follow-up messages — “now break it down by region” still refers to the originally pinned chart.

What you can ask

When you pin a saved chart, the agent can read its actual data (subject to your data access setting). It honors the chart’s saved filters, sorts, and custom metrics, so you can ask:

• “Why is this trending up?”
• “Are there outliers in this chart?”
• “Compare this chart’s last 30 days to the previous period.”

If your agent has data access disabled, pinning still works — the agent sees the chart’s structure (name, dimensions, metrics) but no row values are sent to the underlying LLM.

Example use cases

Period-over-period comparisons

Agents can answer time-comparison questions directly — month-over-month, year-over-year, or any custom offset — without you having to set up the comparison in the Explorer first.

When you ask a comparison question, the agent picks a base metric, a time dimension, a granularity (day, week, month, quarter, or year), and an offset (how many periods back). It then runs the query and adds a comparison column next to the base metric, labelled with the offset (for example, Revenue (Previous month)).

Prompts that work well

• “Compare revenue to last month”
• “Month-over-month new users”
• “Year-over-year orders by week”
• “Show revenue this quarter vs the previous quarter, and vs the same quarter last year”

You can stack multiple comparisons on the same metric (for example, MoM and YoY together) and you can use a custom metric as the base.

Period-over-period is for comparing whole prior periods (last month, last quarter, last year). For period-to-date questions like MTD or YTD, ask the agent for a filtered aggregation instead — for example, “revenue so far this month vs the same point last month”.

Limitations

• The granularity must match the time dimension’s interval — ask for “monthly revenue vs last month” (not “daily revenue vs last month”).
• The agent can’t yet sort or filter on the generated comparison column directly; sort or filter on the base metric or the time dimension instead.

Advanced visualizations with window functions

AI agents can handle complex analytical queries that would traditionally require writing intricate SQL or YAML configurations. In this example, we demonstrate building a 3-month rolling average visualization using nothing but natural language.

This demo shows:

• Creating complex window function calculations with plain English
• Building a 3-month rolling average without writing SQL or YAML
• AI agent understanding your semantic layer context automatically
• Generating production-ready charts from a single natural language query
• No need to manually configure partitions, ordering, or frame clauses
• From question to visualization in seconds, not hours

FAQs

1. Does Lightdash store the query data?

Lightdash only stores simple one-line answers so you can look back at your conversation history. We also save the basic query info to recreate these when needed. The actual data and detailed results stays in your warehouse and gets pulled fresh when the results are revisited (unless data access is enabled).

2. Can I assign a default agent?

You can assign your default agent in Ask AI by clicking the star by your agent’s name.

The default agent setting is per-user, per-project. There’s no project-wide default at the moment. If you haven’t set a default, there’s no predictable way to determine which agent appears first.

Known limitations

These limitations reflect the current state of AI agents as we continue developing and improving the feature. Many of these constraints will be addressed in future releases, so stay tuned! Your feedback and feature requests help us prioritize what to build next.

Data analysis and calculations

As mentioned in the FAQs, AI Agents currently work with your dbt model metadata rather than actual data values. This means they can’t perform forecasting, predictive analytics or custom statistical calculations. They also can’t create table calculations or custom fields on-the-fly.

Query and visualizations constraints

Results are limited by configurable query limits set at server level to ensure good performance. These limits can only be adjusted through environment variables at the moment.

Agents can create tables, bar charts, vertical bar charts, line charts, scatter plots, pie/donut charts, and funnel charts, but don’t yet support custom visualizations or big number charts.

Data access and context

Agent access to your data is controlled thorugh tags in your dbt models. If certain fields aren’t accessible, check that they have the appropiate tags assigned to your agent.

Agents don’t remember context between different conversation sessions. Each chat start fresh.