As a business intelligence user, this probably sounds familiar: Most dashboards only provide you with a standardized canvas and a fixed library of charts, and the “analysis” consists of a CSV export that takes you to another system. Or sometimes it's designing the dashboard that’s the challenge: You can picture the executive briefing, the customer-facing portal, or the interactive explainer that you want, but can’t assemble it out of the available grid tiles.

Either way, the solution has always been to build a custom application. The advent of AI has sped up the process — a working prototype now takes an afternoon — but the excitement of that first demo fades fast. Without access to governed data, row-level security, an infrastructure owner, or a clear path through security review, a tool written by an LLM is simply a prototype that can never go to production.

Today, to bridge this gap, we are announcing Looker Data Apps (in preview) — pairing the speed of agent-generated applications with the governance, security, and trust of your existing Looker governance framework. Describe what you need in plain language, and the agent builds it as a real, production-grade application hosted natively inside Looker!

A data app is a bespoke, interactive web application generated by an AI agent and hosted natively within Looker. While dashboards provide top-down visibility, data apps serve as an active system of action designed around a specific operational workflow. A data app:

Goes beyond standard grid tiles with pixel-perfect, bespoke layouts configured for a specific operational role or job-to-be-done.

Enables business users to input parameters, test scenarios, run live simulations, and update underlying records.

Connects end-to-end business processes by connecting data analysis to business execution tasks like updating source records or dispatching events to tools like Salesforce and Jira.

Data apps do not replace dashboards; they expand the boundaries of what you can build on top of your existing dashboards and semantic layer.