How ‘vibe analytics’ democratizes serious play

Researchers and vendors have been working to democratize analytics for decades. Spreadsheets, Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), and visual analytics each ushered in a new era of citizen analytics in their day.

Plotly is now pushing this envelope a bit further with so-called ‘vibe analytics,’ inspired by the vibe coding meme in software development. The company has pioneered open source tools and is stewarding a community for using LLMs (Large Language Models) to write analytics code in languages like Python. This promises to democratize analytics a bit more – for better and worse.

Vibe analytics can lower the bar for discovering new insights using a variety of analytics and visualization techniques. Business users can explore novel graphing techniques like heatmaps, histograms, and Sankey diagrams without having to learn the nuances of Python coding libraries.

Chris Parmer, Plotly co-founder and Chief Product Officer, explains that users can now bypass the rigid learning curves ...