Name: Introducing Generative Data Apps
Uploaded: 2026-05-14T19:00:57.220Z
Duration: 23 min 37 s
Description: Introducing Generative Data Apps

Transcript for "Introducing Generative Data Apps": Alright. Hello. Sweet. Hello. Hello. How's it going? I think this is our first live webinar. Am I allowed to say the word webinar? I don't like the word webinar. Barry hates the word webinar. A few years ago that I was like, my promise is we'll never use the word webinar. And George, the CEO of Fivetran, replied to it. He says, you will take you will renege on this promise or whatever. And lo and behold, people use the word webinar here, but I won't. So this is a live virtual event or whatever. Live hangout. Live stream. And, we're here to talk about generative data apps, which is a, amazing new thing we we launched in beta just yesterday and, has already been seen people build some really amazing things. And so, we wanna share a little bit about what this feature is about, the backstory, how we built it. Most importantly, show you a bunch of the really cool things you can do with it, and then talk a little bit about where it's going and, what's next. Amazing. Cool. So I did think I would start, with a a brief hit on the bit of the backstory on this because, this is all at once something we've been working on just for a couple months, but also something we've been thinking about for a very long time. Yeah. So we first released our AI features first round of our AI features, February 2022 seems or February 23. Sounds sounds like a long time ago now. Feels like a lifetime ago. And, you know, that those features very much used all the the visualization capabilities we've already built into the Hex platform. Because one of the things we'd spent a lot of time on over the years was building out this really rich way to build take your analysis and then not only build visualizations, but configure and build what we call data apps, which are these really flexible things that could be like a dashboard or a report or something more interactive. It was like, actually, one of the first things we built was this whole drag and drop WYSIWYG Yeah. App builder. And it was good. It was great. And we even had versions of our AI features that could sort of help you build those. But last summer, we started questioning this and thinking about, hey. What if what if the future of this is just all generative? What if it's CodeGen? You could go all in on that. We built a first prototype with some experiments on how to do this in AppGen last summer. I think our our read was the models weren't quite ready. Like, they were good, not quite. And it was pretty slow. Pretty slow. For just one chart. Just one chart. We did some experiments with fine tuning. We looked at a lot of different model types, and we decided to kinda set it down and focus on some other things, including our main agent work, which has been obviously incredibly amazing. And, then it was the beginning of this year that we picked this back up and said, we think this now is the time to actually go forward on this. And so for the last three months or so, we had a very small team. Two birds. A couple engineers Mostly just a couple people and, one designer. Building this. And a few weeks ago, we decided, hey. This has gotten to the place where we're we're excited to release it. And so, that leads us up to the beta yesterday. And, yeah, yeah. So yesterday, we went live. So the generative apps are now in beta. They are available for anyone and everyone on the Hex platform. So you can definitely try it out right now if you've not already. It's it's definitely early. We definitely think there's still some rough edges, but we already in the last, like, two days have gotten so much feedback. That's been awesome. That's been great. And we're gonna be moving really fast here. So a lot more to come. And if you hit rough edges or improvements or have feedback, send it our way. And and this isn't beta. Today, it's alongside that traditional drag and drop app builder, which you can still use, and those apps still work. Yep. But our goal is for this to be the primary way and, the future of how you do this and, application and hacks. And so over the course of the beta, making a bunch of improvements, and eventually gets to the point where this is the the default and the the thing. So Yeah. I'm really excited about it. I think that was something I was a little hesitant at at first about. But just seeing everything you've been able to build, it feels like we've released a 100 features in one week. Yeah. That's true. We've, okay. So we've been enough talking about it. Let's Show it off. Jump in and show off. So, let's see some of the stuff we built. Alrighty. I asked Olivia. I said that you tested the screen share. I did. She said I did. I think you wanna do entire screen. We will just do entire screen. That's fine. Alrighty. Cool. Can you guys see okay? Great. Alright. Like any good cooking show, we're gonna put something in the oven, to bake. So if you're in the Hex platform, you can kinda just kick this off from the home page. So I'm gonna kick this off and let the agent work on this. This is integrated directly with the notebook agent experience as is today, so you don't really have to do anything new. You'll see at the top, there's this new little, app builder, which you can choose between classic or generative. If you are not sure also, the agent can ask you. But we're gonna jump right in. So while this is while this is going, we're gonna we're gonna show off some other really cool apps. So this is probably one of my favorite ones. I think one of the really cool things about generative apps is you really have full flexibility on the way it look and feel like, the look and feel, and I think this is such a good example of that. Holy moly. Everything is fully customized, like, down to these, like, little, like, lights, flashing. I'm trying to place this theme. It's kinda like retro future punk spaceship. Yeah. I feel like we're on intergalactic new universe. I'm into it. And, of course, you know, an app like this, the theme is maybe a little funny and, but I think it actually just shows you the possibility about Yeah. What you can be building. Maybe your company is spaceship that does spaceships, and this is your your thing. Maybe your company does spaceships. Yeah. So it's super cool. There's all these little, interactive inputs that you can use. You can actually add queries, and it's really, really awesome. Cool. What's next? Alright. Another one. We have a little ARR what if simulator. So this app, I I thought was really cool because one of the awesome things about generative apps is the agent can actually be a lot smarter about what it brings in client side. So you have actually these really awesome responsive interactive apps. And so here, I literally have this, input slider that can and as you change different parameters and variables, it's all live updated, and you can kind of see how different things affect your end ARR, ending customer count. You can look at churn. So this is actually based off an example we saw internally with our finance team who wants to have all these, like, really rich interactive ways to explore what is, you know, like, what does the future revenue look like based on all these little tweaks? Fortunately, our numbers are a lot higher than this. Yeah. This is good demo data. The the one interesting thing about this is this is notionally the kind of app you could have built in hex before. Like, you how we had input parameters and sliders. We had charts. We have single value cells. But there's just a ton of little details, that are, like, kind of the customization and look and feel stuff that, like, it's just a long tail of things that, you know, not only did just being able to prompt this into being be a lot easier than, like, going through and clicking and dragging, But also just, like, just you could have full control over it. And I think even if we hadn't built, you know, that exact permutation in the feature you wanted, which is awesome. Yeah. One specific thing I remember. So Madeline is on our vis team. Mhmm. Mighty, mighty vis team we have at HEX. They're awesome. And I I always say they had the longest number of feature requests per people. Like, there was always an infinite number of feature requests they had. And one of the, feature requests that she would always talk about was making our big numbers more interactive, having sparklines, having these little, like, ways to customize what's in them, and that was constantly, customer feedback we were getting. And now this is all just really easy to do. These are fully customizable and Yeah. Let's look at some more. Cool. Here's a little another one, and I think this is cool. Again, you get a lot of the full, full, customization, and you also I think the cool thing is tables are interactive. Yeah. So this is one thing. Feature we never built. Now Feature we never built. There. Yeah. This is one, again, our finance team really has been asking for is, like, much more interactive table style. So you just edit the numbers in there and then Yeah. Updates? It should just update. Yeah. Theoretically? Yeah. Cool. Okay. Let's look at another one. Cool. Sweet. Here's another one, a live funnel analysis. We never had really nice funnel charts. So this is, like, another one fully interactive. You can kinda just play around with it. Cool. Yeah. And Yeah. All these other you can pick basically which actions are you wanna, look at the final drop off for. So Oh, interesting. Joe's dream on our on our Yeah. Our growth and monetization team. I remember when we were building out all of our first initial onboarding, getting a simple funnel analysis was Yeah. Was pretty hard. How do you keep going? Cool. I love this one. This one's probably, like, maybe my favorite. Okay. So this one is actually based off of, an internal app Caleb made. So Caleb's on our data team, and we're in the process of migrating all of our company metric apps to use GenApp so they can be a lot more interactive and just honestly, just cooler. So it's actually based off when we have internally, fully custom branded. You see all your high level company metrics, and you can pop right into any of these, which is cool. And, you can have full breakdown. It's really, really rich. This is themed as Nexicorp, which we always say is, like, our alter ego. Like, if we were, like, a global evil corp. Yeah. Or if we did Nexicorp. Okay. And you can go back. And one of the cool things here is we have this operating model. So we're actually gonna use this internally for how our metrics tree. And I remember Yeah. Maybe, like, two years ago, three years ago, I remember getting a deck of, like, hand, like, drawn Yeah. If you were doing, like, big jam or something like that. Big jam of how, like, all the metrics were defined. And I remember, our data team was trying to explain it to everyone during one of our company presentations. And it was always just, I think, hard to grok externally, and now it's gonna be fully customizable. And you can actually click into each of these drivers, understand the relationships between things. I think I even saw a version that we had. Maybe it's the internal one where, like, these nodes are, like, interactive. Can you oh, what a load. Oh, there we go. Okay. Great. We did it. This up. Or else you can actually so, like, what I mean, small detail here that I'm obsessed with is just, like, the highlighting over. Yeah. Yeah. I guess, something so small that Yeah. Actually was really We never built the hover drop shadow for your metrics tree feature. Exactly. It is. Yeah. So I can click on this and play with it and then see, oh, it's live updates. Yeah. Yeah. This is so cool for these types of scenario things. And, like, maybe this is actually the type of thing this is the type of thing maybe you wish you could have built an app. It would probably wind up back in spreadsheets. Maybe you could try to jam it into some type of a terrible dashboard thing, but this this is just such a great way to do it. And I wanna talk a moment because we've been talking a lot about the UI and the look and feel of all this, but, like, I think what's so important is what's going on underneath and, like, why we even built this. At the end of the day, it's because this is built on all of your data. Totally. And one of the cool things we've been able to do is, like, incorporate this in our platform where this is querying from your data warehouse, your database. It's respecting your Data connections. Yeah. Data connection permissions, and, of course, all the context, which is really important. Totally. We've done a ton of work, if you've been keeping up with what we've been doing recently on context studio, semantic models, guides, being able to do stuff externally, suggestions, like, all of that context, accumulates and compounds and then makes it so when you are, quote, unquote, vibe coding what it is, you know it's gonna be based on that trusted context. You know, it's gonna be accurate, and it's secure. And so if I share this, right, it's gonna respect permissions. I'm not if if it's based on an underlying table or a data connection that I don't have access to, I'm not gonna be able to see it. Like, I think that's super important with this stuff because you can build all these things, but, like, how do you make sure it's, like, sort of ready for work, ready for, scale? Totally. That's really important. Totally. I think another small thing that it feels small for us, but it's actually such a big deal is the publishing aspect. Right? In any sort of traditional web app, you have to deploy an app. You have to publish it. You figure that out, and that's actually a lot of steps. I was just on a call last week where I was talking with the data team, and they were like, we don't wanna build a whole CICD pipeline. I'm like, good news. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. We have this awesome feature coming because people are trying to do this right now. That's right. Yeah. So let's go back. Do you think the, one we popped in the oven earlier is ready? It's fully baked. Okay. Alright. It's in it's it's happening. For a New York Times style. What was the actual original prompt? Review our revenue and marketing metrics. Data story. Okay. So let's see what it did. So one of the things I really like specifically about generative apps as well is that they don't have to just be traditional dashboards or traditional, like, you know, data apps. You can actually kind of do any sort of layout. And so this one is one I've been having a lot of fun with. As a PM, I'm often writing or sharing out kind of point in time memos and being able to have a much more beautiful presentation is really cool. So you can actually the agent is is going on. We love it. It's done. It's dude, we timed it perfectly. We're back. So let's see. Let's go scroll through. Let's see. So you can see here, we have beautiful charts out of the box, and it's really, really awesome. Yeah. This is really nice. It's just the again, it's the type of thing you'd never been able to do in a BI tool or whatever. You know? Totally. And then behind the scenes, this is actually all the code it's generated. You can actually see it's, like, using components. So, it actually imports those components, and this is the JavaScript so you can see all of it. Definitely, a to do for us is just making all of the editing here easier and nicer. But for right now, all agent driven. What's good? Oh, sorry. Go ahead. I was just like one minor thing that I think we spent a lot of time thinking about. And, again, our mighty this team, and they're absolutely incredible. A lot of what we spend our time on is how do we make the charts really beautiful out of the box Yeah. Exactly. And look really nice. Models aren't great, nice, like like like, following best vis standards type stuff. Yeah. That is something we know a lot about. One thing I always say is it's really easy to get something to 80% with models right now. Yeah. It's about that, but, like, 80 to 90 is actually so hard, and it's something that continues to surprise me building AI products. The last 10%, unless you're a deep expert in that workflow or really think about it Yeah. It's really hard to get the models to do it out of the box. Okay. So that's a good segue maybe to talking just the last couple minutes about, like, where we're going. So you mentioned making it easier to edit, and there's a bunch of places things we're gonna do there, editing ergonomics, being able to focus edits, all of that. I think speed's another one. We saw that this worked for five, six minutes now. Yeah. I always call out. That is much shorter than it would have taken to Totally. Try to build this yourself. But, obviously, you want, you know, having that feel snappier and, we're doing a lot of thinking on, like, the right size of models to use for different tasks here. Okay. That's I wanna queue up something else. It's it's really cute. What else are we thinking about? What else are the big things on the horizon right now? Totally. So one thing probably the meet biggest ask that we've heard already is ways that you can customize visualization context for your organization. Yeah. A lot of orgs have custom branding they want. Mhmm. They have standards for their charts or types of charts they prefer. So being able to standardize that and kind of make it context the same way you have data has context. Visualization and presentation of data actually has a lot of context too. So that's something we're thinking a lot about. The other part of this is I think we really wanna make the editing workflow here much richer. Zero to one feels really fast, and we wanna make that last mile, all the tweaks changes a lot faster. You can imagine a world where you could just, like, highlight Totally. That directly and edit it. So a lot more to do there. And I think the last thing we're thinking a lot about is, okay. You've made these beautiful apps. Can we make them even more powerful? You can imagine if they were stateful, have, like, more interactions that you could write out data Sure. Elsewhere and take action. So I'm really excited. I know it's not sexy necessarily, but I'm I'm really excited about also more of the stuff on the governance and observability side. Like, the I think Totally. This is very cool, but I actually think secretly the coolest thing we've built last few months in the context studio. Yeah. Because it it sort of breaks that trade off between, I want everyone in the org to be able to ask and answer data questions, but, like, I wanna make sure they're giving good answers. Totally. I wanna have observability into that. I wanna make those answers in the context better. And I think pulling a lot of this through there too and, like, how you can this is almost the next frontier of, like, okay. You're gonna let everyone in your org vibe code data apps on your data. That's cool and exciting because people, like, wanna do that. They wanna build. They wanna use your data. Yay. But, like, how do you do that in a way that's, you know, you're not getting a bunch of, like, inaccurate slop or whatever floating around. So that's, like, a problem we continued, I think think is, like, very rich, and, there's a ton we're doing there as well. And I think, like, right now, what we have is a good first step because behind the scenes, you know, you're using the notebook. It's using, you know, your warehouse to query, but there is a lot of logic today that lives in the JavaScript. And so that's something we're thinking a lot about. How can we make it a lot easier to inspect this? Like, I don't really wanna be reading this personally. So Yeah. Totally. We wanna make that a lot easier. Cool. Great. Well, were there any other demos you wanna show? Let me see while this is working. We got a couple we got a couple questions from well, I got a ton of questions from our global audience. I will field while you're doing that. Yeah. Question. Can you take a classic app that already exists and turn it into a generative app? You will be able to. I think the path the the migration path there is literally just gonna be, like, at tagging the app with the agent and being like, translate this. It will soon be able to take, like, screenshots of these apps, more easily and sort of run them, in a virtual browser and be able to do that. So that will be a thing. So we'll make that much easier. It's a great question. How would this work for drilling down, exploring the underlying data and charts? Totally. That is something we're also thinking a lot about. Drill downs, exploring a really powerful feature in our product today. We wanna bring that through to this experience in a in a cool way. The other thing I'd say is, the chat with app functionality we have in the current apps is not here yet, but will be soon. That's another great way if you wanna, like, sort of ask a follow-up question, be able to go deeper on something, that will all be there as well. One more thing on the explorability and drillability. One thing that's cool about it all being cogenerated is actually authors of apps with the agent can actually really customize what they want that drill down experience to look like. And so one thing I thought a lot about now is or currently is, like, the dashboarding experience today. It's a very you know, whatever is available in our explore cell, you can do. But now, because this is all generative, you we can predefine some, like, drill down patterns, but, actually, authors can really make it easy to customize what they want the interaction patterns to look like. Love it. Sometimes you want drill down, sometimes you don't. Yeah. On the rails. Do you anticipate the ability to save upload user inputs such as buzz budget figures to either hex locally or something like BigQuery? We'd love to transition our department budgeting to hex. We would love that too. That sounds great. Yes. In class another feature in classic apps today is the ability to upload files and CSVs. I think that will be coming eventually as well. You can already do that, upload it into the project, but, there's there. And then Olivia mentioned this a little bit too of, like, state persistence, I think, is a really interesting thing. Like Yeah. Do you wanna have the ability to better support for things like write back and things like that? So stay tuned there. And is commenting something on the horizon for these like we have today in classic app. Yes. Yes. It will be. It will be. It will be. Many things. Many things on the horizon. Can I show you this other one? This one? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's see. This was a slide deck. So as a quick aside, I think my personal favorite of these is these presentation styles. I hate making slide decks. I think it was the worst part about being a PM. So I've been having a ton of fun. This one was really cool. Again, totally custom themed. Like, it's a Spotify wrapped themed, but you can just kind of click next and I love this. It's so awesome. And I actually been using these for a couple team presentations because instead of just showing them a dashboard, like, it's so much more fun to make it as, like, an interactive slide deck. And Yeah. You can add animations too. Like, oh, that was great. We have people about we have people about games and things too. It's crazy. Yeah. I still like a good deck. I think the process of, like, thinking through things is useful, but I think this is awesome if you're, like, presenting, presenting something. There's one more that I'm trying to which one was it? Isn't this one? Oh, this one. This one was really cool. I think it just shows the power of How do you mean to just go into Slack? I know. I also, when I first opened this app, thought I was, like, in the wrong screen. I was like, what? What am I doing? Amazing. This is really fun. People at Slack slash Salesforce, please don't sue us for, infringement here. Wow. This is cool. This is so funny. Well, neat. Well, cool. Well, I think we'll wrap it up here. We'll do more of these soon. There's a ton more coming here. I just, basically every week, every we'll be just pushing updates to this. So please keep sharing your feedback, your thoughts, feature requests. We love it all. We're very hard at work on this, and, so excited to see what everyone builds. And on that note, there is a hackathon I've been told. Yes. There is a hackathon to encourage all of our customers to build build the coolest generative app possible, and there will be prizes. I've been I'm told the prizes include an Ooni pizza oven, which is truly elite, an Eclipse speaker, which also sounds elite literally and figuratively of, as an Ooni pizza oven stand. I can assure you that is a very valuable prize. So, yeah, if you, create a generative app, tag us on social, tag Hex on x or LinkedIn or Whatever social media you use. TikTok. I don't know if we're on TikTok, whatever. Read it. Whatever. And you'll be eligible for this, and hopefully, you can win a pizza oven. So It'll be really awesome. I'm really excited to see everything. I think we're submitting we're submissions are through May 29. So So you have about two weeks. Two weeks. Awesome. Alright. Well, we'll leave it there. Thanks everyone for joining. It was wonderful, doing this with all of you out there on the Internet, and, we'll see you around soon. Thanks for joining. Later. Bye.