The January release of ThoughtSpot v6.0 is jam packed with a raft of new features. The new version has improvements across the board from leveraging existing investments in your cloud data warehouse platform, the ability to use lower cost S3 or Google Cloud Storage, adoption tools to assist users onboard faster, new chart styling capabilities and more.
So like a parents I have no favourite children and no favourite ThoughtSpot feature. But maybe I have a couple of slightly more favourite ones....
One of the things I like about ThoughtSpot is that it allows you to move fast, to think of a question and just get an answer, without having to wait. So when I looked at the new features, there were two that stood out as "accelerator" features that can get a business to the point of delivering value from their data faster.
Embrace
Embrace is new feature that allows ThoughtSpot to direct query data stored in a modern cloud data warehouse and to use ThoughtSpots analysis and visualisation capabilities to understand that data. Embrace currently supports data stored in SnowFlake, Amazon RedShift, Google Big Query and Microsoft Azure Synapse.
I am in love with Embrace as it accelerates deployment. With Embrace there is no additional data modelling or data import process required, it reduces data governance workload by keeping a single view of the data, Embrace also allows you to join data across multiple external databases and reduce the time and cost of ETL development required to get ThoughtSpot into Production.
Answer Explorer
My equal favourite feature alongside Embrace, is the new Answer Explorer. I love Answer Explorer because it is a feature, built specifically for new non-analyst users. ThoughtSpot leverages AI and the ML from other users, to suggest the next best question to ask of your data, directly from your pin board.
With new users, especially ones who are not familiar with analytics, I find they can sometimes be nervous about "breaking" an application and this causes doubt and hesitation to really start to dig in and get their hands dirty. Answer Explorer (shown on the right of the image below) provides a more guided experience for the user, its a little step that builds their confidence, showing them how to delve into their data and driving adoption widely across the organisation.
"Answer Explorer ... is a feature, built specifically for new non-analyst users."
Version 6.0 has a swag full of new features, to learn more about this latest release you can take a look at this overview on the ThoughtSpot website or the latest ThoughtSpot documentation.