# Meet Golden Analytics, an AI-Native BI tool: With Francois Ajenstat

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2026-04-08
- **Format:** Video · 48 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Data visualisation, AI & ML, Industry trends
- **Tools:** Golden Analytics (analyze, command k, communicate, discover, mcp, prep, slider of autonomy); Power BI; Tableau
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/meet-golden-analytics-an-ai-native-bi-tool-with-francois-ajenstat
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgxu4UTUG6g

I sit down with Francois Ajenstat, former Tableau and Amplitude leader, to get a first look at Golden Analytics, his new AI-native BI tool. He walks through the product's discover, prep, analyse and communicate flow, and we discuss his philosophy of empowering analysts rather than replacing them, plus where the BI industry is heading in an AI era.

## Key takeaways

- Golden Analytics is built around four jobs to be done: discover, prepare, analyse and communicate, with an AI agent always present alongside a canvas you can edit manually.
- The 'slider of autonomy' principle lets you dial AI help up or down at every step, so the AI augments rather than replaces the analyst and you always retain control to fix the last 10-20%.
- Features that usually require hacks or blog tutorials, like lollipop charts, quadrant mode and waterfalls, are exposed out of the box via a Command K palette or natural-language prompts.
- The tool starts as a full browser experience but already runs natively in Claude via MCP, reflecting an 'and not or' view of where data work happens.
- Building AI-native from scratch avoids legacy technical debt, letting the team ship at a far faster pace than the quarterly or yearly releases of established BI tools.

## Chapters

- 0:00 Reconnecting and why now
- 1:38 Francois's background and the genesis of Golden
- 1:45 What Golden Analytics is
- 6:18 Product demo: connecting data and discover
- 9:40 Prep, the slider of autonomy and data enrichment
- 12:42 Analyse: charts, next best actions and Command K
- 16:08 Communicate: dashboards, stories and chat
- 19:21 Humans and AI working together
- 22:19 Choice, semantic models and interoperability
- 24:23 The future surface of work
- 26:58 Pace of building in an AI-native era
- 29:32 Challenges facing the BI industry

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/meet-golden-analytics-an-ai-native-bi-tool-with-francois-ajenstat

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena