Our Thoughts on Sigma’s Fall Product Launch
This past week Sigma released its latest update, a significant product launch that we’ve eagerly anticipated at Brooklyn Data Co. — one that responds directly to clear market demand and demonstrates Sigma’s ability to innovate swiftly. While the launch offered a wealth of impressive new features, we’d like to highlight three key updates that we believe will provide the most impact: semantic modeling, AI integration, and user interface upgrades.
Semantic Modeling
One of the most common pieces of feedback we hear from clients and our internal teams is that they’d like to see the integration of semantic modeling in Sigma. Organizations often request this feature when planning migrations or scaling advanced business intelligence (BI) toolkits. With their newest product, Sigma recognizes the increasing importance of a semantic layer for data governance and scalability. Other platforms have quickly adapted with proprietary tools or third-party integrations, but until now, the most similar approach to semantic modeling was through the metric-building tool for datasets. While this tool facilitated robust reporting, it had limitations in replicating metrics across different datasets.
It’s clear that Sigma has been listening to feedback and has built a comprehensive solution that benefits users across their data maturity journey — a no-code semantic layer that uses Excel-based syntax for building custom metrics. This feature, combined with governance layers, empowers individual business units to create and maintain metrics they can utilize organization-wide. While this capability is particularly beneficial for smaller, fast-moving teams, best practices suggest that centralizing semantic modeling can streamline processes, as organizations scale. Thus, we expect the no-code layer to see wider adoption among smaller or less data-mature organizations.
The no-code solution isn’t Sigma’s only enhancement to metric building. Sigma introduced integrations with third-party semantic layers (e.g., dbt, Databricks), for more mature data organizations. This eagerly anticipated feature could be a significant reason for an organization to choose Sigma as its primary BI tool.
AI Integration in Sigma
Sigma has entered the competitive AI landscape by addressing real challenges and leveraging large language learning models (LLMs) to enhance their solutions without falling into the AI-first hype. This thoughtful approach is evident in two key areas: AI-powered insights and integration with Glean.
The first solution tackles a common need — providing stakeholders with a written interpretation of presented data. For analysts, generating these summaries can be time-consuming, often adding limited value. However, with this new tool, end users can access summarized insights from visualizations, enabling them to quickly answer straightforward questions and focus on understanding the business context of data so they can take action. What wasn’t clear from Sigma’s presentation was whether these insights can be published as text elements in dashboards or are intended solely for hover-overs; the former would be particularly valuable.
Glean streamlines the aggregation of unstructured data from channels like Slack and email, tailoring it to user relevance for more efficient interactions with dashboards and internal documentation. Sigma’s Glean integration enhances user experience by contextualizing data with internal resources. Whether checking if team members are discussing findings or searching for supporting documentation, this integration accelerates existing workflows. We believe this will be especially beneficial for advanced organizations where users are comfortable navigating the platform independently.
User Interface Upgrades in Sigma
Sigma’s user interface upgrades are noteworthy, particularly the introduction of containers. This feature allows users to embed complex visualizations, tables, or additional business context in a hover-over format. It provides end users with deeper insights and enables developers to guide users toward critical takeaways. Additionally, this functionality alleviates the need for cumbersome page switches, allowing users to create streamlined, single-page experiences. Alongside the containers, Sigma has introduced advanced filtering options, enabling users to apply filters within containers for more tailored, complex solutions.
Our Overall Thoughts
This product launch exceeded our expectations with thoughtful and powerful enhancements. Sigma’s updates are well-balanced because they add value to young and mature data organizations. Their enhancements reflect key trends in the BI industry, which place greater emphasis on semantic modeling and improving the end-user experience. We’re excited to use these new features and see how they can benefit our clients.
Want to learn more about Sigma’s latest features? Reach out. Our team of experts would be happy to tell you more.