Genie Agents with dashboards

Published dashboards include a Genie Agent by default to allow business users to explore data using natural language. A Genie Agent is a no-code interface that provides an Ask Genie button on published dashboards, allowing viewers to chat with the data instead of relying only on predefined visualizations. The Ask Genie button is available to viewers both in the workspace and when dashboards are embedded using basic embedding. See Genie Agents.

When you publish your dashboard, the Enable Genie toggle is on by default, and Databricks automatically generates a Genie Agent based on your dashboard datasets and visualizations. Alternatively, you can link to an existing Genie Agent or turn off the toggle to disable Genie.

Companion Genie Agents use Genie Agents concepts, which enables Genie to reason across multiple steps and data sources to answer complex questions.

Viewers can also have Genie scan a dashboard page and summarize notable findings as insight cards. See Dashboard Insights.

For more information about Genie Agents, see Genie Agents.

note

Ask Genie is only available in basic embedding. Ask Genie is not supported in Ask Genie is not available in external embedding. For external embedding scenarios, use the Genie Conversation API to integrate natural language querying capabilities.

Control access to your dashboard's Genie Agent

To enable or configure a Genie Agent for your published dashboard:

1. Open your dashboard.
2. In the right panel, click Settings. Or, click the kebab menu > Settings to open settings.
3. Click General.
4. The Enable Genie toggle is on by default. Turn the toggle off if you want to disable the Genie Agent for dashboard viewers.
5. (Optional) To link an existing Genie Agent, select the Link existing Genie Agent radio button and paste in the associated URL. If you don't select this option, Databricks automatically generates a new Genie Agent based on your dashboard when you publish.

important

When viewers use Genie, their questions are answered from the full dataset query results. If a dataset query includes sensitive columns or rows, that data becomes available to Genie even if it is not shown in visualizations. Define your datasets to include only the fields and rows you want users to access. See Permissions for Genie Agents.

note

Companion Genie Agents don't appear in your file browser or the Genie listing page. When you republish your dashboard with changes, the associated Genie Agent updates automatically to reflect the new datasets and visualizations.

Open the Genie Agent

To open the published Genie Agent in a new window:

1. Click the kebab menu in the upper-right corner of the chat window
2. Click Open Genie Agent.

note

You can't edit the instructions for automatically generated Genie Agents from the Genie Agent UI. The Genie Agent updates when you republish the dashboard with changes.

Ask Genie about a specific chart

To ask Genie about a specific dashboard chart:

1. Click Ask Genie from a Genie-enabled published dashboard.
2. Click a dashboard chart to select it. Genie displays the selected chart title in the chat window.
3. Ask questions about the data represented in the selected chart.

Ask Genie to explain chart changes

You can ask Genie to explain changes directly from the chart for bar, line, and area time series visualizations (including multi-series and stacked charts), pivot table cells, horizontal bar charts, pie charts, and heatmaps. Genie enters Agent mode to analyze the change and identify top drivers.

To explain a chart change:

1. Click Ask Genie from a Genie-enabled published dashboard.
2. Right-click on a supported visualization.
3. Select the option to ask Genie to explain the change.

Genie analyzes the selected change and returns an explanation with the top contributing factors.

Dashboard Insights

Beta

This feature is in Beta. To use it, a workspace admin must turn on Dashboard AI Insights from the Previews page. See Manage Databricks previews.

Dashboard Insights uses Genie to analyze the charts on a published dashboard page and surface notable findings, such as trends, outliers, comparisons, and top drivers. Viewers can review the findings as insight cards and ask Genie follow-up questions instead of scanning every chart. In the Genie panel, the feature appears as Key Insights.

Requirements

To use Dashboard Insights, the following must be true:

• A workspace admin has turned on the Dashboard AI Insights preview.
• The dashboard is published with shared data permission (embedded credentials). Dashboard Insights isn't available on dashboards that use viewer credentials.
• Genie is enabled on the published dashboard.
• The dashboard page contains at least one line, bar, area, or combo chart.

Generate insights

To generate insights for a dashboard page:

1. Open a published dashboard and click Ask Genie.
2. In the Key Insights section of the Genie panel, click Generate insights. Genie scans the supported charts on the current page and generates insight cards. Generation can take a few moments.
3. Review the insight cards. Each card summarizes one finding and shows a category tag, such as Trend or Outlier.
4. Click a card to see the full details. To go to the chart that an insight describes, click the chart icon next to the insight title.
5. (Optional) To rate an insight, click the thumbs up icon or the thumbs down icon next to Is this useful?.

To regenerate insights for the page, click the refresh icon in the Key Insights section.

Ask follow-up questions

After you review the insights, type a follow-up question in the Genie chat to explore a finding further. For example:

• "Why did revenue drop last week?"
• "Which region is driving this increase?"
• "Show me the trend for the last 90 days."

Genie answers using the dashboard's data, the same as any other Ask Genie conversation. To focus a question on one chart, see Ask Genie about a specific chart.

How insights are cached

Genie caches insights for each page and labels each set so you can tell whether it's current:

• Insights are stored per dashboard page. When you return to a page, Genie shows the insights it already generated.
• If you click the refresh icon and the insights are still current, Genie shows Insights are already up to date.
• Each set of insights shows when it was generated, such as Generated 5 minutes ago.
• Insights are generated using the dashboard's default filter values. If you change filters after the insights are generated, the generation label indicates that your filters differ from the ones the insights used.

Permissions for Genie Agents

Permissions depends on whether the Genie Agent was autogenerated or linked.

Autogenerated Genie Agents follow the dashboard's credential model:

• If the dashboard uses embedded credentials (shared data permission), the Genie Agent also uses embedded credentials. Genie uses the publisher's credentials to access data, so viewers can interact with Genie even if they do not have direct access to the underlying data.
• If the dashboard uses viewer credentials, the Genie Agent also uses viewer credentials. Each viewer's own data access permissions apply.

Linked Genie Agents always use the credential settings configured on the Genie Agent itself. The dashboard's credential settings have no effect on a linked Genie Agent.

In all cases, viewers must be members of the workspace to interact with Genie Agents. To learn more about access types, see Manage dashboard and Genie access.

Edit your dashboard's Genie Agent description

Databricks automatically generates a description based on your dashboard content. You can edit the description at any time.

To edit the description:

1. Open the Genie Agent.
2. Click Configure.
3. Click the edit icon next to Description.
4. Enter or edit the description and click Save.

Incompatible SQL expressions

Linked Genie Agents cannot use datasets that contain the following SQL expressions:

• Identifier clause with a non-constant string, as in the following example.

  SQL

  SELECT * FROM identifier(:param)

• Temporary views or functions in multi-statement datasets, as in the following example.

  SQL

  CREATE OR REPLACE TEMPORARY VIEW taxis AS SELECT * FROM samples.nyctaxis.trips;
  
  SELECT * FROM taxis;

• Referencing a volume in the SQL that defines the dataset, as in the following example.

  SQL

  SELECT * FROM csv.`/Volumes/catalog/schema/volume/my-data.csv`

note

If only some datasets in your dashboard use unsupported expressions, Ask Genie uses the supported datasets and ignores the unsupported ones instead of failing. For example, if one dataset uses IDENTIFIER() or a UDF, Ask Genie still answers questions from the remaining supported datasets.

OpenSharing

Datasets shared using OpenSharing are not supported in Genie Agents that use embedded credentials (shared data permission). OpenSharing uses a credential system that is incompatible with Genie's credential delegation. To use these datasets with Genie, use viewer credentials instead of embedded credentials.

Limitations

• Ask Genie is not supported in external embedding. For external embedding scenarios, use the Genie Conversation API. See Ask Genie is not available in external embedding.
• You cannot edit the instructions for automatically generated Genie Agents from the Genie Agent UI.
• Companion Genie Agents support up to 30 dashboard datasets. If your dashboard uses more than 30 datasets, only 30 are included in the Genie Agent.
• Dashboard filters do not carry over into the chat context when using a linked Genie Agent. Dashboard filters work as expected with autogenerated Genie Agents.
• Ask Genie ignores datasets that contain identifier clauses with non-constant strings, temporary views or functions, or volume references, and answers from the remaining supported datasets. See Incompatible SQL expressions.
• Datasets shared using OpenSharing are not supported in Genie Agents that use embedded credentials. See OpenSharing.
• Dashboard Insights analyzes only line, bar, area, and combo charts and skips other chart types, such as pie charts, scatter plots, and tables.
• Dashboard Insights uses the dashboard's default filter values. Filter selections that a viewer makes don't change the generated insights.
• Visualizations that Genie One generates use plain-text titles, because you can't edit a generated visualization. In a Genie Agent, a generated widget's title supports rich text after you edit and save the title or description. See Where formatting isn't applied.