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Data Formulator

interactive AI agents for data analysis (Microsoft)

Details

External ID
45890394
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Data Formulator
Website domain
data-formulator.ai
Launched
Nov. 11, 2025
Cohort
—
Upvotes
38
Upvotes percentile
0.7893013100436681
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.

Description

Hi everyone, we are excited to share with you our new release of Data Formulator. Starting from a dataset, you can communicate with AI agents with UI + natural language to explore data and create visualizations to discover new insights. Here's a demo video of the experience: https://github.com/microsoft/data-formulator/releases/tag/0.....This is a build-up from our release a year ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41907719). We spent a year exploring how to blend agent mode with interactions to allow you more easily "vibe" with your data but still keeping in control. We don't think the future of data analysis is just "agent to do all for you from a high-level prompt" --- you should still be able to drive the open-ended exploration; but we also don't want you to do everything step-by-step. Thus we worked on this "interactive agent mode" for data analysis with some UI innovations.Our new demo features:* We want to let you import (almost) any data easily to get started exploration — either it's a screenshot of a web table, an unnormalized excel table, table in a chunk of text, a csv file, or a table in database, you should be able to load into the tool easily with a little bit of AI assistance.* We want you to easily choose between agent mode (more automation) vs interactive mode (more fine-grained control) yourself as you explore data. We designed an interface of "data threads": both your and agents' explorations are organized as threads so you can jump into any point to decide how you want to follow-up or revise using UI + NL instruction to provide fine-grained control.* The results should be easily interpretable. Data Formulator now presents "concept" behind the code generated by AI agents alongside code/explanation/data. Plus, you can compose a report easily based on your visualizations to share insights.We are sharing the online demo at https://data-formulator.ai/ for you to try! If you want more involvement and customization, checkout our source code https://github.com/microsoft/data-formulator and let's build something together as a community!

Enrichment

Theme
browser automation and scraping for AI
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Analytics & BI
Audience
Developer
AI stance
AI feature
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
ai agents for data analysis
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Yes Building an interactive data analysis interface that generates Pandas code and Vega-Lite/Chart.js visualizations from natural language is a well-established LLM agent pattern.

Discussion

13 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: ZenQuery, Definite

Concerns raised: Missing documentation on database connector setup, LLM-generated SQL produces inconsistent results across runs, Risk of being perceived as generic AI wrapper shovelware

Feature requests: Dashboard builder and live document sharing capabilities, Codify natural language questions into reviewable, deterministic queries without LLM, Enhanced report generation with UI controls for composing visualizations and data components

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 243 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #53 of 244 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 8 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a analytics & bi tool for Legal yet.