Enhance Looker user experience via GenAI-powered extensions | Dashboard summary

In the previous blog, we have gone through a technical-extensive journey set up Dashboard Summary extension. In this part, we will introduce how to utilize the extension on the viewpoint of business user.

How to use the extension?

It is quite straightforward about the basic use cases of the extension that we can derive from its name. Given a Looker dashboard, the extension will help to summarize key information from each tile of that dashboard with just one click. Check out this quick video guide to understand how we can use extension:

To take a look at the UI of the extension, open this tab: Applications → Dashboard Insights Power by Vertex AI.

This extension will only work by adding it as a tile into a dashboard, following these steps below:

• Step 1: Open a dashboard, click Edit dashboard
• Step 2: On the top left of that dashboard, you will find the button to add extensions, after seeing the extension name on the top right, click “Add to tile”. Now the extension UI will appear as a tile on your dashboard. Click “Save” the dashboard
• Step 3: Click “Generate” and wait for summary results. Results will be generated for each tile.

Who is this extension for?

Dashboard summary extension can cater multiple use cases and personnels.

• Imagine you are a new Looker developer who is just on the first week of onboarding. There are hundreds of dashboards scattered around multiple folders, each one has dozens of charts (tiles), not to mention intricate business metrics illustrated, waiting for you to explore and enhance. This overwhelming situation can be mitigated if only there is someone to guide you through each dashboard and show you important points & takeaways. Conveniently, this AI-powered extension is for this exact case. Just one click away, complicated insights, trends, cycles are summarized into readable paragraph, enable Looker user to guide themselves to understand dashboards.
• On the other hand, sometimes you may find yourself working on a slide deck and you have to pull out multiple dashboards in a tight deadline. This extension is a helpful assistant and it provide concise content from charts, ready for your presentation.
• Even for experienced BI developers, the “Next steps” suggestions from this tool can help them to easily detect abnormal patterns in the data and raise alerts to investigate. This feature is what I found particularly interesting, and to be one of the highlight of extension’s usecases.

Evaluation of extensions

Strengths

• Easy-to-use: Regrading user experience, this extension is easy to use. Once being set up, it can handle a large number of requests from Looker users, with minimal maintenance efforts from the developer team
• Accurate summary: Number, trends, and overall insights are reported accurately
• Next step suggestions: This feature is what I found particularly interesting and the highlight of the feature. This feature will easily find abnormal patterns in our data and alert users about that
• Open source and customizable solutions: this extension is flexible in a way that we can customize to use any LLMs and deployment service that are best suit to our organization’s tech stack

Drawbacks

• Lack of flexibility for end users: End users cannot customize prompt sent to Vertex AI
• Strict requirement on chart elements: The returned summary seem to rely on metadata such as axis titles, so it might sounds unnatural sometimes. Therefore, dashboard developers need to make sure chart title’s and legends’ names need to be readable before running the extension
• Inconsistent results: Generated results are sometimes inconsistent for the same chart. For example, when summarizing a bar chart showing revenue breakdown by month, some results were able to describe trends and outliers, while others just listed out numbers, with no actionable insights

Takeaways

Overall, like other GenAI products, to make the extension generate more accurate results, we need to fine-tune the prompt used in this extension that may incorporate organization contextual data and expert knowledge. Currently, the option to adjust the prompt is not available in the UI. However, there is a workaround for this that is presented on the first part of this blog series. Read more about improving prompts: https://cloud.google.com/gemini/docs/discover/write-prompts

Keep in mind that generated responses from the extension is not a gold standard, but the interesting use cases and an ease of use are still a hook, and more importantly it’s open source solutions, with a lot of potentials to customize and improve thanks to community contribution. And luckily, users can always ask for dedicated and expert team to setup this extension by visiting our website.