Rubrik turns an analytics bottleneck into instant, self-service insights with WisdomAI

Overview

Rubrik is a security and AI company focused on protecting customer data and systems from cyberthreats. Founded in 2014, Rubrik is powered by a global team of more than 3,000 employees and serves over 6,100 customers around the world, including organizations in healthcare, financial services, public sector, and critical infrastructure. The company is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, with a market capitalization in excess of $20 billion as of August 2026.

Challenge: Dashboards can’t keep up with the questions

As Rubrik scaled, its commitment to data-driven decision-making ran into a capacity problem. Employees across the company kept turning to the data engineering team for new reports and dashboards, and requests were piling up faster than the team could build them.

Much of the demand was for quick, ad hoc answers, not full dashboards. Maybe the team needed a couple of metrics to sanity-check a new product launch or wanted a read on which industries were performing well. Whatever the case might’ve been, the traditional model treated every question as a ticket in the data team’s queue.

Drawing on a rule he’d developed earlier in his career, Ajay Sabhlok, CIO and CDO at Rubrik, estimated that roughly 80% of the requests that came in were ad hoc and lightweight. Even so, they were competing against the same limited engineering capacity as the more complex, heavily-built out dashboards.

About three years ago, that imbalance finally came to a head.

“When I saw a 500% backlog compared to my data engineering capacity, I said, this is not working. This has to change,” Sabhlok says.

Solution: Conversational analytics that speaks Rubrik’s language

Seeking a better way forward, Rubrik evaluated its options and landed on three key requirements: conversational analytics, dynamic dashboards, and ease of implementation. 

The right platform would enable employees to ask questions in plain language and get answers instantly, without waiting on the data team to build a new report every time a question came up. Rubrik’s initial instinct was to look at simple natural query language (NQL) tools, but the team quickly realized that returning raw data points wasn’t enough. What they needed was a system that could interpret the data, understand the question behind the question, and come back with something resembling an analyst’s perspective.

Ease of implementation mattered as much as the solution’s underlying capabilities. With an intuitive, self-explanatory interface, employees rapidly understood the platform’s value, and teams were able to get up and running quickly. Dynamic dashboards meant the data engineering team wasn’t stuck building and maintaining static reports for every ad-hoc request.

After surveying their options, Rubrik ultimately decided that WisdomAI met all of the team’s requirements:

• Conversational analytics: Employees ask questions in natural language and get answers instantly, with no SQL or dashboard-building required.

• Dynamic dashboards: Reports and visualizations generate on the fly, so the data analytics team isn’t stuck maintaining static reports for every one-off request.

• Ease of implementation: The platform was easy to deploy, with an intuitive interface that allowed teams to get value quickly with minimal enablement.

“Once you actually have a wide variety of questions in GTM or finance, you’re dealing with a multitude of tables and complex metrics. Knowing and defining that context so that it accurately generates a query that can respond with the right result — that’s where it differentiates from regular ChatGPT-style tools.”

—Sham Reddy, Senior Director, Data, BI & Advanced Analytics, Rubrik, Inc.

Rubrik didn’t roll out the platform cold, either. The team started with a single, well-understood area, bookings, and worked through the top 20 questions people were actually asking. They tested each one individually, fixed any semantic issues they found, and handed the vetted set of prompts to end users as a starting point they would trust. From there, employees could keep exploring on their own, building on an already validated foundation.

Results: Confidence, speed, and growing demand

With WisdomAI’s Adaptive Context Engine, Rubrik’s employees didn’t have to wait on the analytics team to answer every new question anymore. Instead, they gave the tool context once and let it handle the rest as an always-on, super knowledgeable member of the team.

“You’re actually training another individual. You’re just giving that context to the tool. Once the tool has the context, it’s able to generate any type of query you ask.” 

—Sham Reddy, Senior Director, Data, BI & Advanced Analytics, Rubrik, Inc.

The move to WisdomAI also changed the underlying economics of running the BI function. Under the old model, every new report or dashboard meant more headcount. To build out hundreds of dashboards, Rubrik would need to scale the team roughly in lockstep with the number of requests that came in.

Conversational analytics changed the equation. Instead of a team that grows with every new request, Rubrik now needs a smaller core group of AI Context Engineers focused on refining semantics, enriching context, and managing adoption. Such work scales far more efficiently than building and maintaining report after report.

Thanks to WisdomAI, Rubrik achieved:

• Confidence in the numbers: Employees now approach business intelligence with trust in the answers they’re getting rather than second-guessing the data.

• Just-in-time answers: Insights arrive right when team members need them, with no waiting on the busy data engineering team.

• Natural, conversational interaction: A conversational interface lets employees ask questions in everyday language, without needing to know SQL or how to configure dashboard tools.

• Deeper, self-service exploration: The tool acts like a knowledgeable analyst on demand, pulling additional metrics and building out a fuller story instead of giving a single static answer.

• A more efficient BI operating model: Rather than scaling headcount with every new report, Rubrik invests in a small core team that maintains context and governance.

“We’ve seen some really powerful outcomes as we started to get into conversational analytics.” 

—Ajay Sabhlok, CIO and CDO, Rubrik, Inc. 

Looking ahead: Context at enterprise scale

As more teams see WisdomAI in action, demand is spreading well beyond the initial rollout.

“The excitement’s growing because more and more people are requesting it. They’re like, we love this idea, we hear from these other users that it’s working well for them. So we absolutely want our subject area to get included. Whether it’s the people team or procurement, everyone’s lining up for it.” 

—Ajay Sabhlok, CIO and CDO, Rubrik, Inc.

For Rubrik, scaling that demand responsibly boils down to one thing: context.

“It’s very, very important to get accuracy at scale for analytics. And to get to that, context becomes super critical.” 

—Sham Reddy, Senior Director, Data, BI & Advanced Analytics, Rubrik, Inc.

Rubrik plans to expand WisdomAI to new departments, but its roadmap doesn’t stop there. Longer-term, Sabhlok sees an opportunity to tackle the most complex slice of Rubrik’s reporting needs: the heavily built-out dashboards that still require significant human resources to create. His hope is that agents will be able to take a full set of business requirements and build those dashboards directly, tying a bow on the more complex 20% of needs that conversational analytics hasn’t fully solved yet.

“I think we are already seeing the potential here. We are going to continue expanding our footprint, and the partnership with Wisdom has been great as well. I think it’s important that we work with a partner that listens.”

—Ajay Sabhlok, CIO and CDO, Rubrik, Inc.