If you worked with Microsoft Office in the 90s or early 2000s, there is no doubt you remember Clippy, the animated paperclip that popped up with “helpful” advice. It was charming — and incredibly limited. Ask Clippy a slightly complex question, and it had no clue how to help.

We’re finally living in the world Clippy promised: you can actually ask a system in plain English to “show me ROI by channel this quarter”, and get a dashboard instantly. What used to be a running joke about bad assistants has become a reality with AI.

And this is not just a shift in ways of working, but in capabilities and the ability to predict outcomes. For decades, marketing and sales decisions have been guided by a mix of intuition, scattered spreadsheets, and static reports. Experienced professionals often develop instincts that serve them well, but instincts can only take you so far in a world where markets change daily, customer sentiment shifts overnight, and data lives across a dozen platforms.

Gut feeling has to evolve into data-driven confidence.

That’s where AI-powered dashboards — and specifically, Tinkery’s approach to them — are transforming the game. We’re proud to announce that Tinkery is now part of that future.

Introducing Tinkery’s AI dashboarding experience

Until now, Tinkery has helped business teams unify messy commercial data, clean it in seconds, and ask questions that get real, actionable answers. With the launch of AI-generated dashboards, we’re taking that experience one step further.

From today, any user — regardless of technical background — can create a complete, visually rich dashboard just by prompting in natural language. It's not just a new feature. It's a new way to work.

Gut feeling is no longer enough

Marketing teams today wrestle with three compounding problems:

• Fragmented data across Google Ads, social media, HubSpot, Google Analytics, and more.
• Shorter decision cycles, where campaigns can underperform within hours.
• Leadership expectations for provable ROI, not just impressions and clicks.

This leads to teams spending countless hours tweaking their CRM, exporting CSVs and wrangling spreadsheets. By the time reports are ready, the opportunity to act may already be gone, or it will certainly be undermined.

According to Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey, leveraging data, analytics and measurement is their top priority to boost productivity and performance, followed by using technology such as AI to to automate key tasks. Quite telling!

The dashboard difference, and why AI matters

Traditional dashboards have one big limitation: they’re preset. Someone defines the reports upfront, and you’re stuck working within those boundaries. If you want to explore beyond the template, you need technical skills, a lot of trial and error or, else, you wait for someone else to build it.

Tinkery removes those barriers.

What’s different with Tinkery’s AI dashboards?

• Create dashboards on the spot. Ask questions in natural language (“Show me pipeline contribution by channel for the last 90 days”) and generate a dashboard instantly.
• No boundaries. Move beyond static, predefined reports and explore your data as your questions evolve.
• Dynamic and iterative. If the first chart isn’t exactly what you need, refine it with another prompt, just like you would with a conversation, or go back and edit it easily.
• Accessible to everyone. No SQL, no BI jargon. If you can ask the question, you can see the insight.

👉 Instead of waiting for data, Tinkery lets marketers and sales teams interact with it.

From marketing performance and campaign ROI to sales pipeline velocity or customer churn predictions — all of it is now accessible in dashboard form, instantly.

🧪 Try asking:
“Show me pipeline velocity by campaign in the last 90 days.”
or
“Compare paid vs organic ROI this quarter.”

If your data is connected, Tinkery can deliver it — beautifully.

The human factor: training users to ask better questions

Of course, AI dashboarding is only as good as the questions it’s asked.

That’s why Tinkery doesn’t just give users tools — it teaches them how to think in prompts. For some, this is second nature (hello Gen Z). For others, it's a mindset shift.

This means that part of the journey is helping users learn how to think in questions. The best teams don’t just give their people tools, they train them to ask better questions.

In Tinkery’s case, this new functionality was built for non-technical users, so they can move faster without relying on data teams.

Best practices for training

1. Start simple. Encourage users to begin with broad questions (“Which campaigns drove pipeline this month?”) before layering complexity.
2. Provide templates. Offer sample queries and dashboards as inspiration. Tinkery can generate these for onboarding.
3. Encourage iteration. Remind users it’s a conversation, not a one-shot request. The first dashboard is rarely the final one.
4. Cross-team learning. Create a space where marketers and salespeople can share their “favorite prompts” with colleagues.

Training is less about “teaching BI” and more about helping users adopt a questioning mindset.

Generational shifts: Gen Z vs. older professionals

There’s another important factor: generations approach data differently.

• Gen Z and younger millennials grew up asking questions into a search box (Google, ChatGPT, TikTok). For them, typing “show me…” feels natural. They expect instant, conversational answers.
• Older generations (author raises hand) are often more comfortable with structured, preset reports. They value consistency and may feel uneasy if dashboards look different every time they’re generated.

The key is not to favor one group over the other, but to blend their strengths:

• For Gen Z: give them freedom to explore and experiment.
• For older professionals: provide reliable templates and training that builds confidence.

This generational shift is not a problem but an opportunity. Mixed teams can balance speed and reliability, creativity and consistency.

The future of decision-making is conversational

Dashboards used to be end points: something you presented after the fact. Now, they’re living conversations with your data.

With Tinkery, creating, refining, and sharing dashboards is no longer a chore or a specialist’s job. It’s a natural part of daily work. And as more teams learn how to harness this power — across generations, roles, and skill levels — decisions will become faster, smarter, and more collaborative.

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Sources:

• McKinsey, the State of AI (link)
• Tinkery survey to users, September 2024
• Hubspot, 2025 State of Marketing (link)
• Gartner, 2025 CMO Spend Survey (link)