Administer Spotter conversational search

Learn about Explore's optional AI-powered search experience, how to enable it, and how to allow users to coach it.

Important: Spotter is disabled by default for all users. You can choose which groups are allowed to use it. You can also enable or disable Spotter for individual data sources.

Spotter is an optional AI-powered conversational tool. With Spotter enabled, you can ask business questions using natural language and get AI-generated answers. Then, continue the conversation with follow-up questions. If the AI answer doesn't look right, you can edit it. If you like the AI answer, you can add it to your Explore environment by saving it or pinning it to a liveboard.

Users with permission can improve Spotter with coaching and context. To learn more, see Improve Spotter's AI answers.

Spotter is located:
  • As a search bar on the Insights Bar chart icon home screen, so that you can search any Spotter-enabled data source.
  • As a button in the top right corner of answers on liveboards, so that you can ask follow-up questions about an answer. The answer must use Spotter-enabled data sources.

Watch a user search with Spotter in this video:

GPT and data security

Spotter uses GPT by Open AI, with the large language models (LLM) of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and Google Gemini.

Explore's base configuration content doesn't include personally identifiable information (PII) or sensitive data, but if you create custom Data Studio datasets that do include it, be aware of the following:
  • Explore sends column metadata and sample values as part of the prompt, including PII and sensitive data columns.
  • GPT and Google don't store the data or use it for retraining the model. These capabilities are explicitly disabled.

To learn more about Spotter security, see the ThoughtSpot documentation: Spotter security