S12 Bonus: The Dashboard Mirage: Why Aggregate Metrics Hide Revenue Leaks and the Rise of Autonomous, Agentic Analytics with Bhaskar Sunkara, Founder & CEO of Bicycle AI

Bhaskar Sunkara grew up in Delhi, India, and moved to the states when he started working. He has lived in San Fransisco for several decades now, and has spent a lot of his professional life building systems (infrastructure, observability and now, analytics). His prior startup, AppDynamics, was eventually acquired by Cisco. In general, he stays curious about how things work, and likes to deconstruct systems to figure out how they work. Outside of tech, he is a big sports fan, enjoying football, baseball, cricket and basketball. In fact, he grew up watching Michael Jordan and the bulls.Bhaskar noticed that business teams were drowning in dashboards, and as such, were not sure how to take the next steps in the business. He and his team realized that what people needed was not a retroactive view, but a proactive one - something more akin to a 24x7 analyst.This is the creation story of Bicycle AI.SponsorsUnblockedTECH DomainsMezmoBraingrid.aiLinkshttps://bicycle.ai/https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhaskarsunkara/Timestamps0:00 Intro and episode teaser on the limits of manual KPI monitoring1:49 Guest introduction: Bhaskar Sunkara's background and AppDynamics experience2:50 The core problem: Why revenue teams are drowning in dashboards3:53 Origin story: Shifting from reactive dashboards to proactive AI analysts4:36 Identifying target transactional verticals in retail, travel, and payments6:02 Building the MVP: The 1-year journey and defining core capabilities7:06 The three MVP pillars: Data connection, KPI definition, and dimensional search8:33 Strategic trade-offs: Choosing vertical focus over generic horizontal BI10:00 Harnessing LLMs and agentic AI for root-cause context15:00 Establishing single-source-of-truth KPI definitions across departments20:00 How AI agents integrate into existing enterprise data stacks25:00 The future of autonomous analytics and proactive decision-making Current Sponsors: Tiger Data Protected Harbor Render Fitnexa Perplexity Entelligence Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/ Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor. Our Sponsors:* Check out Perplexity and use my code CODESTORY for a great deal: https://www.perplexity.aiAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy