What is Generative BI? Announcing Tightly Analytics’ Deep-Dive Update

The Biggest Problems in E-commerce Reporting

If you run a retail or D2C brand, your day is filled with critical questions: "What were our top-selling products this month?" "How are sales trending compared to last week?"

These are not complex requests, yet getting timely answers has always been a major operational bottleneck.

For years, getting answers meant dealing with the issues below: 

1. Data request - You send your question to the BI or data analyst team. By the time they have capacity to build and send back a report—which can take hours or even days—the opportunity has passed, or your question has already changed.

2. Manual CSV export - This means pulling raw data from Shopify, your ERP, or Amazon into Excel or Google Sheets. This process is not only time-consuming, but it breaks your flow of analysis. Worse, the very moment you export that file, your data is static and already outdated.

"What about professional dashboards?" you might ask. Most traditional Business Intelligence (BI) tools like Tableau or Power BI are incredibly powerful, but they were built for data analysts, not for the merchandising or marketing managers who need quick answers. They require complex data model configuration, manual Data Visualization setup, and ongoing maintenance—a specialized skill set that isn't part of a manager's everyday job.

These combined issues (data delays, stale spreadsheets, and overly complex tools) mean that fast, data-driven decision-making has been nearly impossible for the people who need it most.

Now, a new approach known as Generative BI (Business Intelligence) is making this entire process obsolete. This new wave of AI-powered BI is built on Conversational Analytics, designing a solution that lets you talk to your data. Instead of building reports or writing code, you can simply ask your questions in plain English, just as you would with ChatGPT. In seconds, you can generate reports with AI in the form of a perfect chart, graph, or KPI card that answers your question.

The Solution: The Shift from Generative AI to Generative BI

The term Generative AI has been everywhere this past year. We all understand its power—we've seen models like ChatGPT write a poem or draft an email. But on its own, a general-purpose AI is just that: general. You can't ask it "What were our top 5 selling products last month?"

And the reason for this is simple: it isn't connected to your secure, private business data, and it has no understanding of your company's logic. That's where Generative BI comes in:

→ Generative AI is the general engine that understands language, powered by LLMs (Large Language Models).

→ Generative BI is the complete system that connects that AI engine to your specific, secure business data. It's an application that uses Conversational BI to understand your question, translates it into a query, runs it against your private data, and generates a visual insight.

This new category of tools, which is part of a larger trend including Augmented Analytics and Predictive insights software, is about more than just processing data. It enables a question to be asked in plain English, and has the system translate that request, find the answer, and instantly generate reports in a clear, visual way.

This is the new frontier of AI analytics, and it's the core of our latest product update. Here’s how it’s fundamentally changing e-commerce reporting.

Announcing: The New Tightly Analytics, an AI-powered BI Solution

We're thrilled to announce the launch of our new Tightly AI Analytics feature. It was built to solve the exact problems we just discussed: getting fast, clear answers from your data without the bottlenecks.

At its core, Tightly Analytics acts as a smart translator. It's built to bridge the gap between how you ask a question in plain, everyday English and the complex database code required to get the answer. It uses AI to understand what you're asking, finds the data, and then automatically builds the perfect chart or graph to show you the result.

How It Works in Practice

 For our customers, product managers and onboarding specialists, here is the full breakdown of how it works.

Step 1: Data Connection

It all starts by bringing your data together.

Tightly securely connects to all the different systems you use to run your business—like Shopify, your 3PL, your ERP, or your POS systems. Once you're connected, the platform automatically gathers all that scattered information and organizes it into one central, clean place. It does the hard work of making sure all your data speaks the same language. 

Step 2: The Conversational Analytics Engine

Getting started is simple. Once you log in, find and click the Analytics section in the main menu on the left. From there, select + Create First Insight to open the Chat View. 

This is a true Conversational Analytics interface. It's designed to let you have a direct "conversation" with your business data, asking questions just as you would a colleague. Let's walk through what happens when you type a request.

You ask a question in plain English, for example - "Top 5 selling products by revenue this month."

As soon as you hit enter, our system acts like an expert analyst, moving through a few steps in just a few seconds.

1. It identifies all the key components of your question:

→What you're asking for: A ranking of products.

→ How to measure it: By revenue.

→The time frame: This month.

→The limit: The top 5.

2. It Translates Your Request

Next, the system automatically translates your plain-English question into the precise, technical query the database needs to find the answer. This is the "no-code" magic at the heart of the feature. It does all the complex technical work for you, instantly finding the exact data you need from your connected sources.

3. It Chooses the Best Visualization

Finally, the system doesn't just dump a raw table of numbers on you. It analyzes the type of answer and automatically selects the best possible data visualization to help you understand it. If your answer is a single, important number like "total sales," it will be presented as a KPI Card. If it is a trend over time, it will generate a Line Chart. For comparisons and rankings, it will build a Bar Chart. This ensures your data is always presented in the most logical and easy-to-grasp format, all without any manual design work.

Step 3: Interacting with Your Live Insights

A chart Tightly generates isn't just a static picture; it's a live, dynamic insight. This is a core part of our AI-driven insights platform. And you have full control over the charts you create, as you can:

→ Edit Titles and Notes: Change the title or add a caption to make it clearer for your team.

→ Drill Down: You can click on a specific part of the chart—like a single bar or a point on a line—to see the detailed data that sits underneath it.

→ Save to Dashboard: With one click, you can save any chart you find useful to your personal dashboard.

Step 4: Dashboard View — Your Insights

Your Analytics Dashboard acts as your personal command center, collecting all the charts and KPIs you save in one organized place. And one of its most important features  is that saved charts do not refresh automatically. Instead, they are saved as a "snapshot" of the data from the moment you generated them. This was a very intentional design choice.

We did this so you can save, for example, your "Final Q1 Sales" report and, three months later, place it right next to your "Final Q2 Sales" report for a clear, side-by-side comparison. If the chart automatically updated itself, that valuable historical data would be lost forever.

This approach puts you in complete control. When you do want the most current numbers for a specific insight, you simply click the "Update" button. The system will instantly re-run your original question and pull the latest data. This method prevents your historical reports from being overwritten and makes tracking your progress month-to-month far more reliable.

Step 5: Pre-Set Queries

We also recognised that users may not always know exactly what question to ask. For this reason, Tightly included a library of Pre-Set queries (report templates that use best-practice e-commerce reporting logic) such as "Top 10 products by profit margin" or "Supplier performance by on-time delivery rate." This feature provides a valuable head start.

→For a more granular, technical walkthrough, our full knowledge base article provides a complete guide to this feature.

See the Step-by-Step Tightly Analytics Guide

Who This Update Is Built For

So, who is this new AI analytics update really for?

 We designed it for retail and D2C brands who need powerful, accessible insights without the cost and complexity of building a full BI infrastructure.

It’s a perfect fit for operations, merchandising, and executive teams—the people who need Automated KPI reporting for daily metrics like revenue, conversion rates, and fulfillment. Ultimately, it’s for any mid-market or enterprise user who wants to empower their teams to find their own answers, rather than relying on an internal data team for every single question.

The End Result - The New Standard for Retail Analytics

For too long, running a retail business has meant choosing between two extremes: struggling with complex, expensive Business Intelligence tools or being stuck in the slow, manual world of Excel exports.

Our new AI analytics tool  provides a powerful third alternative. It means your team can finally get the answers they need without having to write SQL, export another spreadsheet, or wait in line for the data team to get back to them.

Ready to stop exporting and start asking? Book a demo with Tightly and see how our AI analytics can give D2C brands their time back.