From Spinning Wheel of Doom to Automated Insights: Building the Future at Savant
The Problem With Analytics as We Know It
Throughout my career in tech, I’ve spent most of my time on the interaction between audience data and AI-driven optimization. As I built products and evangelized them in market, we’d often paint the vision of streamlined workflows and instant insights. For many of our customers, this was the data-based marketing and advertising nirvana they dreamed of. They could see performance data and have it optimize itself in real time.
Yet, my own personal reality of measurement and optimization never worked quite as well as the external product reality we shipped to customers. As a product marketer, I spent countless hours wrestling with the fundamental challenge that defines so many data-driven organizations: going beyond the audience and marketing performance data to get the actual business data I needed to understand what was really working.
Every time I needed to monitor campaign performance or evaluate audience behavior, I’d embark on the same frustrating journey. First, I’d reach out to data analysts and engineers, hoping they had the bandwidth to pull the metrics I needed. More often than not, this led to long email chains, tickets being filed, numerous pings, and eventually, a query that returned results that didn’t quite answer my original question. Then came the inevitable “Can you re-run this? Something doesn’t look right” conversation.
Once I’d get the data, I’d invariably dump it all into Excel so that I’d have it in a comfortable spreadsheet, even if it meant putting hundreds of thousands of rows of data into a flat file. To pull into reports, I’d spend time cleaning it, filtering it, and inevitably doing a massive VLOOKUP that would take my laptop out of commission for a few hours as I’d watch the wheel of doom spin on and on and on.
All of this manual prep, just to be able to answer: What’s working? What’s not? What should we try instead? These were core business questions that should have been answered in a matter of minutes, not weeks.
This slowness didn’t only affect me. It affected the entire organization. We all were forced to move slowly, just trying to answer basic questions. My favorite data analysts had to spend their days responding to ad-hoc queries instead of focusing on strategic analyses. Engineers had to juggle prioritization between building new tools and models or standing up specific pipelines to serve executive requests. The entire organization would get stuck in a cycle of downleveling our work, because we were all doing so much manual work just to get answers.
There had to be a better way. That’s when I came across Savant.
A Solution for Every Analyst
Seeing the product was an absolute lightbulb moment. Here was a solution that could have saved not only my own time, but the time of every data professional I’d ever worked with. No more manually combining datasets in spreadsheets. No more shutting off every other program on my laptop for six hours so that the massive VLOOKUP would pull successfully. No more pestering engineers for basic metrics. No more waiting days for answers to questions that should be instantaneous. Everything could be automated and intuitive, even for someone who has spent most of his professional life in Excel spreadsheets instead of SQL terminals.
This isn’t a future vision of tomorrow — it’s what we’ve just launched here at Savant: AI agents that are able to not only automate your most tedious tasks, but learn from you, learn the business context of how your organization handles data and reconciles it across systems, and continually improve. All of this frees you up to do less manual work and more creative problem-solving to grow your overall business.
Imagine having an AI partner that can independently analyze your data, identify patterns you might have missed, and present actionable recommendations — all in the time it takes just to format a pivot table. It isn’t science fiction; this is Savant’s latest release.
The hours I spent manually manipulating data could have been hours spent on creative problem-solving and actually implementing the changes our business needed. Every day at Savant, I’m more convinced that this transformation will revolutionize how organizations work with data.
We’re not just making analytics faster; we’re fundamentally changing what’s possible when humans and AI work together. The future of data-driven decision making isn’t just automated, but intelligent, proactive, and finally focused on outcomes instead of process.
That future starts now.
