· 9 min read
A dashboard is just a fancy report if you can’t take action on it.
Today we are launching Dive Apps: fully custom data apps that can write-back anywhere. Build them with your agent and they run on the MotherDuck data warehouse. Use Dive Apps to replace SaaS apps, automate your operations, or bring humans into the loop to steer your agents. They are the best way to use AI to build your business.
Don’t build dashboards - build apps! You have the power of AI behind you. Anything that used to be a report should be an app instead, and can be just as easily. Connect your agent to our MCP server and an app for your whole team is just one prompt away.
Dive apps work by letting your Dive visualizations trigger Flights, our serverless Python runtime. While you can certainly update data inside MotherDuck, the flexibility of Flights means you can write data back into source systems as well. Or send emails. Or post in Slack. One of my favorites is that you can rerun machine learning models (remember when data science was the sexiest job of the 21st century?). For even more power, you can kick off a full-featured agent harness to act on your behalf.
What can you build? #
Dive Apps are designed for flexibility, so there are many ways to use them. Now that custom software is so inexpensive, there are more and more places we will see ROI from building an app. If it takes an hour to speed up something your team does once a week, you see benefits immediately. These are just examples to get your creativity flowing - imagine what you will build!
Replace SaaS Apps
Completely duplicating the capabilities of a SaaS app sounds daunting, but I’m confident you aren’t using every feature of every SaaS app. Agents can replicate just the features that you rely on and customize for your business.
Still paying for project management software? Build an interface that matches your company’s exact workflow. Using a SaaS to stitch together multiple marketing and ads systems? Your agent can load that into MotherDuck and you can build a decision support system for your team. Not only can you make the right decision, but you can push that decision into the upstream systems.
AheadComputing is a semiconductor design company building on top of MotherDuck and is slashing SaaS app costs. Ben Holtzman, staff design enablement engineer, phrased it this way:
"A single license for a power analytics tool for six months could be $50,000. There are basically only three companies that create this vendor tooling. You're operating in a space with a virtual monopoly."
Instead of more licenses, they designed an even more feature rich interface on top of MotherDuck.
Automate Your Operations
Augment your domain experts with Dive Apps that bring together everything they need to make a decision. Then, put that decision into practice right in the app.
Imagine how much faster issues could be resolved if customer support specialists had a custom command center app at their disposal. It could retrieve the full context of how a user is interacting with the product, their contract details, and any similar conversations. Within the app they can send messages directly to the customer. But this is more than a vanilla chat window, this app is a command center after all! It has relevant docs automatically surfaced and best practice snippets ready to embed. As a result, your team moves faster and customers are happier!
How do you handle RevOps today for your sales team? A custom app could build forecasts based on your business’s exact subscription structure and predict based on actual usage statistics in the product.
Instead of just looking at inventory levels, you could actually send out a purchase order when stock gets low. You could game out what-if scenarios to see if same day shipping is worth it or if “priority shipping” is reliable enough to keep your production line up. These kinds of decisions need data from all kinds of source systems.
Steer Your Agents
Over time, agents will take on a larger fraction of the decisions in our businesses. However, if you’ve ever automated a complex business process, you know you don’t just flip a switch and call it a day.
The fastest way to implement automation is to make changes incrementally: first advise, then require approval, then only escalate exceptional cases, then go fully autonomous. Having an app keeps a human in the loop for as long as it is valuable. Customizing that app keeps the time-spent-per-case as low as possible and surfaces all the background someone needs to make a wise choice. Each time the domain expert correctly overrides the agent gets saved to improve the agent for next time. Eventually quality reaches 99.9% and you switch out the lights on that process and let the robots handle it.
That implementation process requires an app that gives the human the ability to write back to source systems and to document where the agent fell short. Without write-back, operators won’t be able to trust the automation or fix things when something unforeseeable occurs.
Build on the Best Infrastructure #
There is plenty of noise about where you should build with AI. Why build on MotherDuck? Fundamentally, it’s because it’s incredibly simple to use, brings all the capabilities of a data warehouse, but skips the drawbacks of a legacy platform.
The Easiest Way to Centralize All Your Data
Your most important decisions need data and context from multiple source systems. If a problem could be solved with data that is already in one place, you’ve solved that problem already. MotherDuck Flights are the easiest way to pull data from anywhere into an efficient, central location. Your agent has the full power of Python available (with all its open source ETL libraries) to pull from thousands of sources in just a couple of prompts.
A Fast Query Engine That Spins Up Instantly
Once your data is centralized, you need a high performance analytical engine to make sense of it. Time is valuable, and whether it’s your operational team or executive team, they need answers quickly. Latency is critical in any app. Joining tables together or extracting meaning out of a deluge of log data are compute intensive, and analytical engines are the right tool for the job.
But you don’t want it to be a huge, always on, monolithic cluster. Likewise, you can’t wait minutes for things to initialize. Especially for data app interactions that can be variable, you want your compute to spin up just as you need it and spin down when you are done.
With MotherDuck, you can handle the scale you need without the multi-second queries and high cost baggage of a decade-old legacy warehouse architecture. In short, you need warehouse horsepower, but with the latency profile of an app DB not a batch job system. On MotherDuck, each user can have their own compute resources too, so nobody waits in line.
Flexibility is Key, Governance is Non-Negotiable
If an app-building platform locks you into cookie cutter widgets, no AI will help you build exactly what you want. Conversely, if there are no guardrails, then you can’t deploy with confidence. MotherDuck includes Single-Sign-On (SSO), Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and now Table, Row, or Column Level Security (TLS, RLS, or CLS). That lets you share your apps with exactly who you need to and lock them down as appropriate. Data in MotherDuck is private by default, so you can opt in when it is time to share with other users. As an integrated part of MotherDuck, you can manage your data and Dive Apps access all in the same spot. No separate dashboard permissioning system!
Store Your Context For the Long Term
If you want your agent to be able to build an app that fits your business rules, you need context. In MotherDuck Guides you can teach your agent about the structure of your data and curate best practices. That way, your agents understand your company’s data and provide more accurate answers. Why Guides? Don’t bet on just one AI lab and put all your context in their proprietary system! What happens when the other company drops a new model that laps the rest? You want to be able to switch to the best in class LLM at a moment’s notice.
You already need a place to store your data, so store your metadata right alongside it. Data stores last forever, but the leader in the AI race changes every week…
Apps That Take Action in Any System
An app is really just a report if it doesn’t actually trigger changes in your business. If your business runs right on top of MotherDuck, write straight back to a MotherDuck database. Or if you want to take action in a source system, Flights can push data anywhere and trigger any actions needed. Your data doesn’t get stuck in any database, it can flow wherever is needed.
Actions can range from something as simple as a Slack alert to actually executing a discount on a customer’s bill. Those financial decisions are cases where the augmentation approach that keeps a human in the loop can be most effective. After the agent gets 50 right in a row, then you can move to auto-pilot with a scheduled Flight!
Conclusion #
If you’re running your business just with an agent on every laptop, you’re still in the spreadsheet era of AI. Sure, you’re emailing around artifacts instead of xls files, but you’re not getting the gains that the AI labs promised. To get the most out of AI, you want to automate entire process flows. To do that accurately, you need the right data and the right context. You need the right guardrails in place to set your organization free to innovate. Dive Apps let you move your business faster because they tie in directly with the full power of MotherDuck.
We can’t wait to see what you build! Quack on!
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