The Dashboard Effect

Microsoft is folding AI into nearly every part of Fabric, and the Fabric Data Agent is now generally available after a long run in preview. Brick and Landon talk through what they've found in testing: where natural language querying holds up, what it takes to get consistent answers, and why we've been adding a platinum stage to the medallion architecture with context files that tell the model how the business actually works.

An MCP server gives an LLM a standard way to reach your data and run tools against it. Every API is built differently, and the Model Context Protocol puts one interface over all of them, which is why Anthropic's standard gets compared to USB C.

This episode covers what the standard defines, how tools and resources set the boundaries on what an AI can do with your systems, and what you get by writing a server yourself. We bui...

The platinum layer sits on top of the standard medallion architecture, built specifically to get data ready for LLMs. In this episode, Brick and Landon break down what it takes to build one well.

Landon walks through the two foundations that make a platinum layer work: markdown files that give the LLM business context and call out data gotchas, and a modeling approach that goes further than typical BI denormalization. They d...

The gold layer is where cleaned, validated data lives in a medallion architecture, ready for reporting and analysis. In this episode, Brick and Landon break down what actually makes a gold layer good.

Landon covers what "good" means in practice: deduplicated data, validated numbers, and a structure business users can trust without checking behind the curtain. They discuss why star schema still holds up as the standard modeli...

How does raw data from a system like Salesforce become a dashboard your team can actually trust? On this episode of the Dashboard Effect, Brick and Landon walk through medallion architecture and the three stages data moves through on its way to becoming useful.

They keep it simple: the first stage holds an exact copy of your source data, the middle stage cleans it up and combines data from different systems, and the final st...

Everyone's asking the same question: why can't I just run all my business intelligence through AI? In this episode of The Dashboard Effect, Brick and Landon break down the real answer. You probably can, but only if your data foundation is built for it.

They cover where AI analytics fit alongside traditional Power BI, why a strong medallion architecture is the difference between reliable answers and confident wrong ones, and ...

In this episode, the team gets hands-on with vibe coding and what it actually looks like inside real data work. From building API connections to generating synthetic datasets, they walk through where AI is genuinely speeding things up and where it still runs into friction.

The big takeaway: writing code might be faster, but everything around the data still matters just as much.

Blue Margin helps growing companies make...

AI is replacing software engineers. At least that's what the headlines say. But is it actually true?

In this episode of The Dashboard Effect, Brick - CEO of Blue Margin and Landon - Data Platform Manager at Blue Margin, get into what AI coding tools are really doing to software engineering teams right now. They cover why developers who tried AI tools in 2024 gave up too soon, how the best engineers on their teams are using C...

Designing a dashboard might seem straightforward, just add charts, metrics, and a few visualizations. But the dashboards that actually help businesses make decisions often look surprisingly simple.

In this episode of The Dashboard Effect, Brick and Landon talk about why the most effective dashboards are usually the simplest to read, and the hardest to build. Behind a clean dashboard is often a lot of complex data modeling, b...

Many companies assume the best way to build a data capability is to hire an internal team. But is that always the right move?

In this episode of The Dashboard Effect, Brick and Landon break down one of the most common questions they hear from prospective clients: Why outsource your data work instead of hiring in-house?

They talk through the real tradeoffs companies face when building a data team, from the challenge of...

Pulling financial data together sounds simple, until you’re dealing with 20+ acquired companies, multiple ERPs, and a reporting process held together by massive Excel files.

In this episode of The Dashboard Effect, Brick Thompson sits down with Senior Account Executive Kate Eberle to walk through a real client example: a PE-backed, billion-dollar organization struggling to consolidate financial data across a highly fra...

Most finance and ops teams aren’t short on data, they’re short on trust in the numbers.

This podcast digs into why reporting breaks down, why Excel becomes a crutch, and what actually changes when companies move to cleaner, more reliable data foundations. We talk with CFOs, operators, and data leaders about the messy reality behind budgets, forecasts, board decks, and “magic spreadsheets” and how teams ca...

In this episode of The Dashboard Effect, hosts Brick and Landon break down why so many data projects fail and how to fix them. Instead of “boiling the ocean” with massive, months-long BI initiatives that never gain traction, they share a practical, proven approach to delivering fast ROI, user adoption, and sustained data success.

Whether you’re leading a data transformation, building dashboards, or just try...

In this episode of The Dashboard Effect, Brick and Landon unpack why so many AI projects fail and how the right data foundation can make all the difference. From breaking down what a semantic model actually is to exploring the role of governance, they explain how structure, quality, and oversight in your data environment directly impact the reliability of AI.

Whether you’re an executive planning your first AI initiativ...

Think you need a big BI team and a big budget to get value from your data? Think again. In this episode, Brick Thompson and Landon Ochs share how small professional services firms can start using data effectively—by focusing on one meaningful problem, starting simple, and iterating over time. Hear practical tips, common pitfalls, and a real-world success story that added millions to the bottom line.

At Blue Margin, we ...

In this episode of The Dashboard Effect, Brick and Landon give an update on Celeste, the internal AI tool Blue Margin has been building to help data teams query, explore, and visualize client data.

They dive into what’s worked, what hasn’t, and the fork in the road between making Celeste valuable for engineers versus business users. Along the way, they share lessons about AI adoption, the limits of “wrapper...

In this episode of The Dashboard Effect, Brick and Landon discuss their shift in thinking on whether to build custom data connectors or use third-party tools like Fivetran. They share the pros, cons, and lessons learned from their proof-of-concept with Fivetran, and why APIs are changing the data pipeline game.

Key Moments:

1:15 – Why custom connectors made sense in the past
2:00 – The rise of APIs and ...

In this episode of The Dashboard Effect, host Brick is joined by Blue Margin account executive Greg to demystify what it really means to “prepare your data for AI.” Rather than focusing on flashy tools and hype, they dig into the foundational steps, like building a modern data lakehouse and semantic layer, that are essential for long-term ROI. You’ll also hear why many companies are pulling back on generative AI p...