Hey folks,
This week, Anthropic launched Claude Dashboards + Claude Motion. You connect your data, ask a question, and Claude builds the dashboard. If you’ve had Claude build a dashboard from a spreadsheet before, this is different in 2 ways. It now stays connected to your live data, and you can see the code behind every number.
Within days everyone was asking the same thing: is this the end of Power BI?
No. And for most small teams it's the wrong question. They never had Power BI. They have a spreadsheet someone updates on a Friday, when they remember.
Here's how it stacks up against the professional tools, and how to try it yourself.
Let's dive in..
What it is
You connect a data source, then describe the dashboard you want. Claude writes the queries, builds the charts and lays out the pages. It runs in a normal chat or from the Artifacts tab.
The best part: click any number and you see the code behind it. If it's counting the wrong number, you tell Claude and it fixes it.
It works with company data platforms like Snowflake, BigQuery and Databricks, with Salesforce, and with other apps you've connected to Claude.
Claude Dashboards
I loaded a Formula One 2026 dataset from GitHub and asked Claude to build me a dashboard.
11 minutes later I had a full breakdown of the season, with every insight the dataset could support.
Then I clicked the data source icon. Every number traces back to the code that calculated it, Python in my case, so you can check exactly how it got each figure.
The fun part came next. I asked it to animate the charts, and Claude turned them into a timeline you can play through. It took a single prompt.
make the charts animated and appear like they are moving slowly on a timeline
Claude Motion
Then I wanted something I could send people. I asked Claude to turn the finished dashboard into a Claude Motion animation, and about 10 minutes later I had a short video built from my own data charts. I asked for a few changes, then downloaded it as an MP4, ready to share.
It was super simple. Motion doesn't generate video the way AI video tools do. Claude writes the animation as code, so you can change any word, number or timing by asking.
Where it falls short
It's great for quick answers but I wouldn't run a financial reports on it yet.
You can see every formula, but Claude makes the changes
There's no single definition of "revenue". Power BI teams spend weeks agreeing what each number means and locking it in. Claude works it out fresh, so the same question asked twice can come back slightly different.
There are no schedules or alerts. Anthropic says dashboards stay current as your data changes, but there's no "email me the numbers every Monday" or "tell me when sales drop" which are prime use cases.
Sharing is basic: a link with access settings, not detailed control.
Anthropic says so itself: Dashboards are made for quick, exploratory questions. For deeper work, you can send a dashboard straight to other tools (for now).
Claude vs the professional tools
Claude Dashboards | Microsoft | Amazon QuickSight | |
|---|---|---|---|
Cost | Claude Pro, $20/month | $14/user/month to share | $40/user/month to build, plus $250/month per account |
Who builds it | Anyone who can describe it | An analyst | An analyst |
First dashboard | Minutes | Hours to weeks | Hours to weeks |
Updates | Stays current, no schedules | Up to 8 scheduled refreshes a day | Scheduled refreshes |
Who sees what | Share by link | Row-by-row rules per person | Row-by-row rules (top tier) |
Track record | Beta since October | 10+ years | AWS's BI tool since 2016 |
If nobody in your team has "data" in their job title, Claude Dashboards is your BI tool now. If you have a BI team, it's their new sketchpad: try an idea in 11 minutes, then build the trusted version properly.
One twist. Power BI's own AI help, Copilot, needs Microsoft's paid capacity plans on top of the per-person licence. And Microsoft now has a MCP that lets AI assistants edit Power BI files directly, and it isn't limited to Microsoft's own assistants. My bet is Claude ends up building your Power BI reports.
Your task this week
Build 1 dashboard from data you already have. Prompt:
Build a dashboard from [your source].
Page 1: [the 3 to 5 numbers I check most].
Page 2: [the trend or breakdown I want].
Before building, flag any data quality issues that would change a number. Don't ask me questions unless something is blocking. Make reasonable calls and tell me at the end what you assumed.That last line is important. The assumptions list is where you find out if the dashboard is right.
I hope you enjoyed the AI buzz today.
👉 This issue is brought to you by BOS, The Business Operating System by UseKase.
👍 Refer our newsletter to your friends and help us grow.
Cheers, Tim
