..if a metric on a dashboard falls below some threshold, absolutely, send an email. But BI tools aren’t pipelines. They’re borders, handing off data between machines and humans. People read data differently than computers—we can digest small amounts of it; we like pictures. We shouldn’t mix what’s meant for humans with what’s meant for machines. And in BI tools, it’s people who do the reading.

Second, BI should be legless. As mentioned above, BI tools are just one of several destinations for a company’s data. If BI tools require their own legs—for example, if they rely on a semantic layer to define metrics—they’ll be duplicative, because the same metrics also need to be defined in other destinations. Instead, BI tools should sit on top of global governance layers like dbt and metric stores. Eventually, a semantic layer will be a bug, not a feature.