Claude Dashboards: what it is and how to use it

Claude Dashboards is a new beta feature that turns a plain-English question about your business data into a live dashboard, with Claude writing the query behind each chart. It is included on paid Claude plans (Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise) at no extra charge, though it counts against your normal usage limits.

Anthropic announced it on October 8 in a post from @claudeai: "Claude Dashboards and Claude Motion are in beta today." The rest of the post asks you to have Claude turn your data into live dashboards. A companion post from @claudeai covered Motion, the animation half of the launch, which we get to below.

What Claude Dashboards does

You connect a data source, ask a question, and Claude builds a set of charts that answer it. According to Anthropic's help article, Claude writes a SQL query for each chart and runs it against your data. The dashboard then stays current as the underlying data changes, and every chart shows when it was last refreshed.

You can also see how each number was made. Click any number to see the query that produced it, or ask Claude to explain it in plain language. If a chart counts the wrong thing, you tell Claude what to fix.

Anthropic's launch article gives a few examples: this quarter's revenue by region, a view of Salesforce opportunities, and a bike-share dashboard built from a year of ride data showing rides per day and by hour.

Which data sources work

At launch, Dashboards connects to five data warehouses: Amazon Redshift, BigQuery, ClickHouse, Databricks and Snowflake. It also works with apps you have connected to Claude, and Anthropic names Salesforce as the example. For a small business, that second route matters more. Most owners don't run Snowflake, but plenty have a CRM. Whether your accounting or scheduling software works depends on whether it has a Claude connector, and Anthropic hasn't published a Dashboards-specific list, so test it before you plan around it.

When a question outgrows a quick dashboard, you can send it to Amplitude, Grafana, Hex, Mixpanel, Omni, Perplexity, PostHog or Sigma. Anthropic says Looker, monday.com and Tableau are coming soon.

How to use Claude Dashboards

1. Connect your data first. Set up the warehouse or app connector in Claude before you ask for anything.
2. Ask for it. In any chat, ask for a dashboard, or pick "Output" in the message box and choose "Dashboards." You can also open the Artifacts tab and start from the Dashboards template.
3. Ask the question, not the chart. Anthropic's own tip is to say what you want answered and to name the table or app if you know it. "Are we booking more jobs this month than last, by service type?" will get you further than "make a bar chart."
4. Refine in chat. Add a filter, switch to a weekly view, or open a chart's query and correct what it counts.
5. Share when it's right. Dashboards start private. Your team can edit the same one, and sharing outside your organization depends on what your admin allows.

On Enterprise plans, Dashboards is off by default. An owner turns it on under Organization settings, then Artifacts. Team plan owners control it from the same place.

What about Claude Motion?

Motion, announced alongside it, turns reports, charts and product walkthroughs into short animations. The @claudeai post stresses that each one is written as code "with no video model involved," which means you can change a word, number or timing and export an MP4. It is in beta on Team and Enterprise only, and longer animations use more of your limits.

Our read

Lots of tools already promise "ask your data a question." This one shows its query next to every number, and we think that's the right call. The way AI reporting goes wrong is usually a confident number that counts the wrong thing, like booked revenue when you meant collected revenue. An ugly chart is a much smaller problem.

So treat the first version of any dashboard as a draft. Open the queries behind the two or three numbers you'd actually make a decision on, and check them against a report you already trust. Anthropic itself calls Dashboards a tool for quick, exploratory questions, so don't make it the system of record yet. If you've used ChatGPT's similar feature, our Intelligent UI explainer covers how OpenAI approaches charts inside a chat.

What this means for your business

A dashboard tool can only chart the data it can reach, so it can't help much if your jobs live in one app, your invoices in another, and your leads in a spreadsheet nobody updates. Getting the data connected and clean comes first, and it's usually the unglamorous part.

If you're not sure your systems are ready for something like Claude Dashboards, that's what our free process audit is for. We'll map where your numbers live and what it would take to get answers you can trust.