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Why Questions using ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst

When you want to investigate further on a chart in ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst, you can now ask direct questions like, "Why did my sales drop last month?" or "Why did sales drop in Q2?" ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst identifies the key attributes and leverages the change analysis engine to provide a clear, natural language summary identifying the key drivers, supported by detailed visualizations.

Now you can easily investigate changes in your data, moving from high-level observations to insights in the same conversation.

Ask a why question

Once you have asked a business question like, “What’s my monthly sales?” or have an existing visualization, you can now ask a natural question starting with “Why”. ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst uses change analysis to answer Why questions about a single metric on simple, non-sliced charts. Below are a few examples:

Why has the revenue dropped after 4th October?

Identifies the revenue metric, picks up the date point to identify the key change drivers between that and the next date point.

Explain the change in website traffic last week compared to the week before.

Compares the website traffic metric for this week versus the previous week.

 

  • Why question process

    Here’s an example for asking why questions in ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst:

    1. Start with a visualization: Begin with a chart in AI Analyst that shows a metric you’re interested in, such as your monthly sales. Or launch ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst from a visualization in a dashboard that has a metric.

    2. Ask why: When you notice a change, like a drop or a spike, simply ask a natural language question in the search bar. For example, after seeing a chart of monthly sales, you could ask, “Why did revenue increase 21st to 24th October?”

    3. Review the analysis: ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst performs change analysis and presents the findings in a structured manner:

      • Analysis plan: AI Analyst first explains how it understands your question and which attributes it will analyze to find the answer.

      • Detailed visualizations: AI Analyst then provides detailed change analysis charts that break down the contributions from different attributes, giving you the full evidence behind the findings.

      • Narrative summary: Finally, ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst provides a concise, natural language summary of the key drivers so you can quickly understand the main takeaways.

  • Limitations

    Why questions in ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst have the following limitations:

    Chart types

    This feature works best on charts with a single measure, and no slicing by color or other attributes. It may not provide an answer for multi-line or complex stacked charts.

    Ambiguous questions

    If your question is ambiguous (for example, you ask about “March” when multiple years of March data exist), AI Analyst returns an error and prompts for clarification. For ambiguous timeframes like “Why did sales drop?”, AI Analyst will default to comparing the last two data points and state this in its analysis.

    Data granularity

    This feature may not work as expected if the x-axis has a very high number of data points (for example, >1000).

    Change analysis

    ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst does not support change analysis for queries based on the growth of and versus (vs) keywords.

    Change analysis is not supported on certain complex formulas based upon group_* functions (such as sum(group) or sum(x)/ group_*).

    Simple functions that only use group_* are supported.

    Personalized columns

    If you have set up personalized columns in a KPI chart, then ask a why question of the chart in ASK BOSCO® AI Analyst, AI Analyst chooses columns based on usage-based ranking to answer, rather than your selected columns.

    This article was prepared for you by Claire. November 2025.

    If you have any questions please get in touch! team@askbosco.io