Why BI Still Doesn't Work for Decision-Makers, and What's Changed
Power BI costs R$100k and nobody uses it. Metabase democratizes the dashboard, but not the question. ChatGPT can't reach your database. A new category solves what none of them do: Conversational BI. And it has arrived in Brazil's mid-market.
Luciano de Oliveira
Founder & CEO, Sozo Data
There's a pattern that keeps showing up at Brazilian companies with 50 to 300 employees.
The ERP is up and running. The data is in the database. Sometimes there's even a Power BI license. Yet when someone on the leadership team urgently needs a number, the routine never changes: a WhatsApp message to the analyst, a 3-day wait, a decision made on gut instinct.
Data isn't the problem. The problem is that it sits behind a door only the technical specialist has a key to.
Why the Alternatives Fall Short
The BI tools on the market were built for specialists rather than decision-makers.
Power BI + Copilot (Microsoft) dominates the market. But for a mid-market company in Brazil, the real first-year cost runs R$100k to R$200k: a consulting project, licenses, training, a DAX specialist. Copilot exists, but it was built for English. Ask it a question in Portuguese about your actual business data and the results are inconsistent. And when the specialist who knew DAX quits, the dashboards freeze.
Metabase made dashboards simpler, and that's a real improvement. But asking a question still takes someone technical to build the query. The first mile hasn't changed: decision-makers still can't get to the data on their own.
ChatGPT with an exported CSV looks like a shortcut, but it doesn't solve the problem. With no database connection, the data goes stale the moment you export it. With no traceability, you can't tell where a number came from. With no security, your data leaves the company.
The outcome is always the same: the person who needs the data depends on someone who knows how to get to it.
What Conversational BI Does Differently
Conversational BI changes the interface rather than building a better dashboard. Instead of clicking through a report, you ask a question in Portuguese, the way you would ask an analyst.
The system connects directly to the company's database, understands how the data is structured, translates the question into a query, and returns an answer in seconds. You get a chart or a number, with the reasoning visible so you can check it instead of taking it on faith.
That covers what the alternatives can't:
- No months-long project. Connecting takes minutes.
- No specialist in the middle. Anyone at the company can ask directly.
- No stale data. Queries hit the database in real time.
- No SQL. Questions are asked in Portuguese, and the system understands Brazilian business conventions out of the box.
The BI analyst is no longer a bottleneck. The CEO no longer decides on gut instinct. And the company works from a single source of truth instead of one per department.
What Entendo Does
Entendo is the Conversational BI platform built for Brazil's mid-market.
It connects to the company's database, whether that's PostgreSQL, MySQL, or one of the ERPs most widely used in Brazil. From there, anyone with access can ask a question in Portuguese and get an answer in seconds.
Two things set it apart for decision-makers:
Transparent reasoning. Entendo shows how it got to the number: the query it ran and the path it took. You don't have to trust it blindly. You can check.
Security by design. The system has read-only access to your data. Nothing gets changed, and nothing leaves your infrastructure. IT signs off before rollout, and every question is logged for auditing.
The cost changes scale too. Power BI runs R$100k to R$200k a year for 20 users. Entendo is SaaS: no project, no consulting engagement, and no dedicated specialist. The gap has nothing to do with quality; it comes from the delivery model.
Who Uses It
Entendo's heaviest users are mid-market companies in retail, services, and financial services that have an ERP up and running, data in the database, and an analyst buried in repetitive requests. The CEO needs independence. The analyst needs time for real analysis. The CFO needs visibility without waiting for the month-end close.
Entendo plans are quoted on request. To learn about the options, talk to the Sozo Data sales team.
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