Sisense launches bots to share business insights from chat apps, Amazon Echo, and IoT lightbulb

Business intelligence company Sisense has launched its enterprise bots that interact with datasets and software, the company announced today.

Sisense bots in public beta today operate on Slack, Skype, Facebook Messenger, and Telegram. In one-on-one or group chat, Sisense bots can tell you how sales are going at any given time of the day or serve up other data and insights on-demand.

The bots are the third part of the Sisense Everywhere program. In July, Sisense debuted an Amazon Echo integration for employees to chat with BI data around the office, and an IoT lightbulb that changes colors based on the status of your key performance indicator (KPI).

Sisense Everywhere connects with and draws in data from servers and individual datasets, as well as from programs like Salesforce, Zendesk, and Google Analytics.

“This allows people to use natural language in order to ask for information from this bot and receive a combination of natural language responses, much like you would when you communicate with a friend, and widgets, images, and charts, that allow you to both consume the data visually but also drill and analyze the data,” Sisense head of product Guy Levy-Yurista told VentureBeat in a phone interview.

“You will be able to connect with this bot and reach out to such a bot and ask a question and get a response the minute you need the data. I don’t need to go into a deck board to drill or look for the right widget or right visualization in order to get the information I need,” Levy-Yurista said.

Sisense bots set alerts for KPI goals and can send push notifications with actionable information to messaging apps. They also send alerts if statistical anomalies occur, and they connect to calendars so they can push important data to employees through a chat app before a meeting.

“The bot will realize that you would need a certain type of data and prior to that meeting, the bot would include that data and send the data to you in a messaging chat channel to let you review that,” Levy-Yurista said.

Since 2010, Sisense has received more than $90 million in funding from investors like Battery Ventures and Opus Capital. In January, Sisense received $50 million in a round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Its solutions are deployed at 3,500 organizations globally in 186 countries. The company is based in New York.