What is vibe analytics?

vibe analytics (noun)

An approach to data analysis that lets decision makers engage directly with data through AI-powered conversation.

What if leaders could get data insights in minutes instead of weeks? Writing in MIT Sloan Management Review, Michael Schrage examines “vibe analytics,” an approach to data that eliminates the traditional translation process between business questions and technical analysis.

The concept builds on “vibe coding” — an AI-assisted method that lets people create code using everyday language — and allows leaders to ask questions like “What’s happening with our conversion rates?” and immediately explore potential causes through improvisational dialogue.

Vibe analytics stands to democratize how knowledge is generated in organizations, writes Schrage, a research fellow with the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. Instead of waiting for static reports, leaders can engage in dialogue with messy and unstructured data, as well as structured data. And teams can turn KPIs into conversational partners and debug assumptions in real time, accelerating decision-making while revealing unexpected patterns.

Firms are already benefiting from vibe analytics. For example, a Southeast Asian telecom company was able to surface more financially relevant insights in 90 minutes than it typically generates in 90 days and developed a novel scoring system that reveals which service contracts correlate with higher margins and risks. And a cybersecurity firm discovered actionable patterns in its freemium customer base that its revenue team hadn’t considered.

Vibe Analytics: Vibe Coding's New Cousin Unlocks Insights