Metabase 61: AI fun police, build questions and dashboards with MCP, and much more!

In v60 we put AI features in all plans, including Open Source. With v61, we give you the controls for AI governance that make it yours to deploy safely. Some call it the Fun Police. We prefer: AI that's realistic for orgs of all types to roll out, including those who need tighter oversight over who gets to use it (bit of a mouthful though). Granular AI controls to manage access per feature and per user group, for internal and embedded analytics. Let your finance team ask questions in their own language in Metabot. Give your product team access to AI for SQL generation or auto-generated transforms. Give your data team access to all AI tools. Set nothing for the teams who shouldn't have it. Find AI usage controls in your Admin settings → AI to give access per feature and user group. Turning AI loose in your org without token restrictions is not for the faint of heart. We added controls to set a token limit at the instance level, and allocate a set amount of tokens or messages per user group, or per customer for embedded analytics. Choose when your limits reset — daily, weekly, or monthly. Set token limits in your Admin settings → AI. Connect Metabase to your AI terminal and build questions and dashboards through conversation. With the MCP server connected in Claude, try: Build me a dashboard from the Metabase sample database showing product performance, like total orders, revenue, and average rating by category. It's more interesting with real data, but you get the idea - now you have a dashboard, and all you had to do was ask. White-label Metabot for your org by customizing its name, icon, and adding system prompts to instruct it on how to perform for AI chat, natural language querying, and SQL generation — so it sounds like it's on your team. System prompts are like context files that give AI the specifics of your business and your Metabase. Give it guidance on the tone you want it to use in chat, tables to treat as canonical, which colleague to blame if something goes wrong. Literally, anything. Customize Metabot and set up your system prompts in Admin settings → AI. AI usage analytics is a pre-made dashboard in your Admin settings → AI. You can see aggregate views of token spend, which features are being used most, and who's most active over time. Track AI usage across your Metabase in Admin settings → AI → Usage auditing. Open Claude Code or Cursor. Type: "Create a dashboard for our support tickets." Your AI tool pulls context from your Metabase metadata, writes the queries, and commits a dashboard YAML file to git, ready for you to review before anything touches production. Bulk edit and migrate dashboards to a new schema without clicking through the UI. Everything goes through git, with automated validation, before it goes live. Requires Remote Sync. What it says on the tin. Open the sample database, pull up Metabot, and try: Show me a breakdown of product reviews by rating. Use emoji labels for each score. Metabot will write the CASE expression and build the column without you touching the expression editor. Not just AI — the metrics layer got smarter too The Metrics Explorer launched in v60 for side-by-side metric comparison. v61 adds metric math and more control over each metric: Revenue / Number of orders , Orders this month - Orders last month ). Results appear as a new series in the view.Handy when you want to combine or compare metrics that live in different tables without having to set up a join. Open a metric and click into Explore to try it. Targeted, timely security alerts specific to your version and configuration, with guidance on what to do about it. See them in Security Center, or get notified via email or Slack. This new Admin page polls your instance every few hours against the Metabase security advisory database, or you can check manually any time. Replaces generic blast emails that can be easy to miss or that aren't relevant to your instance. Find the Security in your Admin settings. Embedded Analytics The useMetabot React hook gives you direct access to Metabot's raw state — messages, indicator, send function — so you can build any UI on top of it. Previously, <MetabotQuestion /> offered AI querying with 3 preset layouts. useMetabot is the lower-level primitive underneath. Same Metabot with more control over how it looks and fits into your app. useMetabot works with Modular Embedding SDK. More usage analytics for embedded analytics to support admins' understanding of who your most active customers — or tenants — are, which content gets the most views, and how people are accessing your embedded content via auth method for security audits. Find the preconfigured embedding usage analytics dashboard in the Usage analytics collection, accessible to admins. Filter on date range, time grouping, and drill through charts for more detail. Find the dashboard in Usage analytics → Embedding Usage in your left-side nav (admins only). Your embedded users don't know what JWT is. They just know the dashboard went blank, and they think they've hit an error. Guest embed sessions no longer break mid-dashboard when tokens expire. Automatic renewal means sessions stay alive through multi-tab dashboard explorations, and filters and drill-throughs stay applied for longer sessions. The new Themes editor gives non-devs a wizard-based tool to try out, preview, and configure new themes to be applied consistently — separating theme configuration from implementation. Try out themes in Admin settings → Embedding → Themes. Better experience for mobile users interacting with your embedded analytics. SDK components are now built for a 6-inch screen, not just desktop. No overflowing filters or truncated text — acts the way mobile users expect. Previously available as a fixed-price add-on. Now pay only for what you use. First 1,000 transforms are free. See the pricing page for more details, or head to Data Studio and give it a try. Thanks to everyone who submitted bug reports, feature suggestions, and pull requests. Metabase gets better and better thanks to your efforts. Hope you enjoy the release. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty, check out our changelog. Cheers, The Metabase team