Why Most BI Projects Fail (and How to Make Yours Work)

Why You Keep Ending Up Back in Spreadsheets

You’ve seen this movie before. Leadership wants dashboards. RevOps wants answers. You buy a BI tool, wire up your systems, and hope it all comes together. Six weeks later, you’re still debugging column mappings. Six months later, you’re still not confident in the numbers. Eventually, everyone gives up and goes back to spreadsheets. Most BI projects fail—not because the tools are broken, but because the data underneath them is. If your data isn’t structured, modeled, and maintained continuously, no amount of dashboarding will fix that. You’ll keep spending time and money trying to make sense of it, and still feel like you’re flying blind.

The Core Issue Isn’t Dashboards. It’s Data Infrastructure.

The real reason BI tools underdeliver is simple: they assume your data is already in good shape. But if you’re using tools like HubSpot, QuickBooks, and Stripe, your data is fragmented by design. It’s optimized for entry, not analysis. So every new report becomes a mini data project—and every update becomes a fire drill.

We Flip That on its Head

At the core of DDAI is a continuously refreshed, centralized Common Data Model (CDM). We harmonize your customer, revenue, and financial data into a structured foundation, backed by automated pipelines that ensure accuracy, consistency, and real-time availability. The chat interface is just how you access it—it’s not the core value. The CDM is the value. With that foundation in place, answering complex questions becomes easy: CAC by product, runway by scenario, churn by cohort. 

Want to Use Your Own BI Tool? Let us know.

We’re considering building support for direct access to your CDM through third party tools such asPower BI, Looker, and Tableau. This unlocks huge gains if you already use these platforms or are planning to.

Save Money and Time

Because your data is already clean and structured in DDAI, the time and cost to configure dashboards is cut dramatically. What would’ve taken $20,000 in implementation and months of cleanup becomes a few days of focused setup. You’re not building pipelines. You’re just connecting to insight. We give you enterprise-grade data infrastructure without the enterprise bloat—then let you consume it however you want: in our interface, in your BI tools, or both.

Tired of BI that takes quarters to deliver value?
Book a demo or reach out to let us know if you’d use BI access to your harmonized data. We’re building this for operators like you. Email me at craig@datadiscourse.ai