Features

Gemini is coming inside Looker Studio Pro – Testing the Formula Assistant

Gemini is coming inside Looker Studio Pro - The formula Assistant

Gemini is coming inside Looker Studio Pro and Looker BI.

Few months ago, a restricted preview program gave a chance to some power users to start to test very promising features. And the program is progressively expanded to more and more users.

I’m convinced that each announced feature will boost our productivity and provide faster answers to specific concerns for data exploration, document preparation and data viz executions with upcoming:

  • Conversational Analytics
  • Report and chart creation by prompts
  • Automated generation of annotated reports inside Google Slides
  • Formula assistant for calculated fields

Let’s start today with a demo video of the last feature in the list above.
Formula assistant!

In the use case below, I cooked a data set of article ids (called also slugs), that includes the date of publication of each article as the first part of a text dimension.
I want to extract it and get the number of past days until now.

So I asked the formula assistant, with a first prompt (remember, as any prompt in Gen AI, we ask, we check the outcome and we adjust with a new iteration of prompt…until the win)

“extract the date at the beginning of the article slug and calculate the difference of days with the current date”
…no detail about the format of the date, but quite specific to drive to the good functions (date_diff, current_date).

The first proposition is very good, not perfect, not the more elegant, but nicely split by step of treatment.
It generated an explicit error. So I take in account the limitation of NUMBER type (generating float here…ok…) and the mandatory forcing of INT64 for my use case. Just putting additional technical information.
“extract the date at the beginning of the article slug and calculate the difference of days with the current date casting numbers with int64”

Voila. Now it is a valid prompt answer. No more error. It adapted the same formula with my custom CAST 🙂
I would not suspect that it would be so easy. Just an example from my tests with the formula assistant.

It is just the beginning of…imagine how it will be powerful and even more time saving with the training of all Looker Studio Pro users? Formula assistant learning just thanks to formula use cases and the schemas of your data sources (anything else, and of course, not your data).

Big ups and Congratulations to all the Looker and Looker Studio teams!

Very exciting experience to be a privileged witness of the arrival of Gen AI in Looker Studio. And I know that it is just the beginning.