Replacing BI Dashboards with a Cortex Analyst Chatbot at Merck

Business people at Merck were spending 20–30 minutes navigating BI dashboards to answer questions that should take two. We replaced that with a conversational analytics layer built on Cortex Analyst and Semantic Views – integrated in a custom-built enterprise chatbot on a FastAPI and Next.js stack. We will cover the full architecture: how Semantic Views encode business definitions for accurate SQL generation, how governed access works across global omnichannel data, and how Cortex Analyst fits into a production system with custom LLM routing and other external APIs and full-observability with zero-trust. We’ll share what moved the needle – including how we quantified a 10x reduction in time-to-answer and what we’d build differently next time.