> A BI tool is mostly a way to turn a query into a picture, and a picture now costs about $0.50 of tokens. It gets hard to justify a $150k licence for that part

That is an awfully simplified view of BI. In my experience, most companies struggle to define what is important, what needs to be measured, and how those measurements should be used to improve business.

While businesses try to work these details out, they try getting their analysts to in the author's words print out good pictures. But the BI tools really exist to make it easy for analysts to navigate hairy internal situations.

Producing a picture or HTML more easily is not going to solve the decisioning problem. If anything it might make it worse.

In the end, it's going to cost a lot more than 50 cents a picture.

Yeah, I personally draw a distinction between data viz and BI. AI has definitely changed the former, it's pretty cool to be able to design visuals with claude design: you're not bound by what libs can do, html + svg lets you visualize data exactly how you want (and you can even get fancy with 3d stuff, with the pitfall of just showing eye candy with no real insights). I've built some fun stuff like that myself (also with duckdb-wasm).

But BI is more than just visualization: you need stuff like solid data models and semantic layers, tools that help enforce data governance (so that the same metric doesn't get re-defined in 12 different places, possibly with slight variations each time), proper access control (with RLS/CLS). Sure you can probably vibe-code your own BI tool, but it's gonna take quite a bit more work than just the viz part.

> most companies struggle to define what is important, what needs to be measured

Today that’s just a chat session, see https://reportr.com

I have loved D3 for more than a decade but I'd never recommend it to a client because maintenance requires a large learning curve. Not any more, ${YourAIAgent} + D3 is awesome.