The Dashboard - A Blip in Human History?

For years, dashboards have been the go-to for visualizing data, digging into insights, and making decisions. I’ve spent the last decade building and handing them out, and it’s been great. But let’s face it—the dashboard, as we know it, might just be a phase.

As AI keeps getting smarter, the need for humans to analyze data and make decisions manually is shrinking. Soon enough, AI won’t just give us recommendations—it’ll make the decisions. Tools like Hightouch are already executing on AI-driven decisions, automating what used to take countless hours of manual work.

In this future, dashboards won’t guide human decisions like they do today. Instead, we’ll need to design with new goals in mind:

• How do we visualize what AI is doing behind the scenes?

• How do we trust these autonomous systems?

• What insights should we still be surfacing, and why?

• Where should humans, AI, and visualizations intersect?

The dashboard is going to evolve into something beyond just a reporting tool. It’s going to become a space where humans and AI collaborate—where the focus isn’t just on showing data, but on using that data to interact with AI and act on it.

Now, AI isn’t ready to take over everything just yet. Most of us still hesitate to trust it with big decisions, and we should. But the gap is closing, fast. Over the next 5-10 years, the dashboard as we know it could shift dramatically. My old friend might not disappear, but its job description is definitely going to change.

The era of dashboards isn’t dead yet, but the future is coming—and it’s going to look different. The way we visualize data, make decisions, and interact with systems is about to get a serious upgrade.

What is dash may never die—but it’s definitely evolving.