Ignite Startups: Bhaskar Sunkara on Reinventing Business Analytics with AI | Ep289
Chat-based analytics still fails if nobody asks the right question at the right time.
Bhaskar Sunkara, CEO of Bicycle and founding CTO of AppDynamics, helped build AppDynamics before its $3.7 billion Cisco acquisition.
They discuss:
· Why dashboard-driven operations are dying when teams must track every product, region, supplier, and conversion path.
· Why natural-language data queries improve access but cannot replace an AI system that proactively surfaces the right signal.
· How AppDynamics earned enterprise trust by running proofs of concept in production, where monitoring products could break customer applications.
· Why AppDynamics initially focused only on Java, production environments, and operations teams instead of developers.
· How Bicycle’s agents detect KPI changes, explain likely causes, take corrective action, and learn from the result.
· Why transactional businesses in travel, retail, and payments need faster analytics because delayed decisions directly cost revenue.
“Dashboard operations driven by dashboards are kind of dying.”
Should AI surface recommendations for human approval, or should it be allowed to act on revenue-critical data automatically?
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