Steven Birdsall, Chief Revenue Officer at Alteryx, joins Techstrong TV at Alteryx Inspire 2026 to discuss how organizations are using analytics, automation and AI to drive measurable business value.

The pressure on analytics teams has shifted from producing insight to producing outcomes. Dashboards and one-off models aren’t enough anymore — what the business actually wants is a measurable change in how a decision gets made, how fast it gets made, and how often that decision moves a number that matters. Closing the distance between a dataset and a business result is where most enterprise AI investments are still falling short.

Steven Birdsall, Chief Revenue Officer at Alteryx, sits down with Techstrong TV at Alteryx Inspire 2026 to talk about what that shift looks like inside customer organizations. His argument is that the old framing of analytics as a reporting function has been displaced. The teams getting real value are treating analytics, automation and AI as a single operating layer — one that doesn’t just describe what’s happening in the business but acts on it in something close to real time.

Speed-to-value is where most of the practical work lives. That means shrinking the cycle between a question being asked and an automated workflow responding to it, lowering the technical bar so business teams can build their own analytic pipelines, and tying every initiative to a concrete metric the business already cares about. Without that discipline, AI investments quietly drift into a portfolio of pilots that never compound.

The broader thread is how the analytics function has to change to keep up with agentic AI sitting downstream of it. Models making decisions on behalf of the business need clean, governed, well-modeled data to act on — which means data and analytics platforms can’t just serve human analysts anymore. Birdsall’s view is that the organizations winning this next phase are the ones treating analytics infrastructure as productive capacity, not reporting overhead.