{"id":78970,"title":"Kater: Ask data questions in plain English","tagline":"Drive business outcomes with an AI analyst that organizes, understands, and remembers all the nuances of your company's data.","body":"# TL;DR\n\nInstead of Slacking the data team and waiting 4 days for an answer, use [Kater](https://www.kater.ai) to get the answer in 30 seconds. We make it possible for executives to understand **why** business outcomes occur, and even alert them **before** the outcomes happen again.\n\n### 👋 Hey Everyone\n\nWe’re [Yvonne](https://linkedin.com/in/yvonne-chou) and [Robin](https://linkedin.com/in/robin-seitz-12029970). We have over 9 years working in data teams for companies like Microsoft, Kaiser Permanente, Crexi, and Abbott. \n\n![Image preview](https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/D5622AQGHB0qqGa37Lw/feedshare-shrink_800/0/1706126655985?e=1714608000\u0026v=beta\u0026t=A02VD99wTGip0YSLOWtEg55JqcFoX8mbfK3Tu-PUryU)\n\nAs data people, **80%-90% of our time** was dedicated to low-level data requests. When really, the true business value of data comes from answering the **“why”** questions.\n\nThat’s why we started [kater.ai](http://kater.ai) — we are committed to automating these low-level questions, and empowering everyone in a company to answer “why” business outcomes occur. **These are the million dollar questions that fundamentally change how businesses operate, and ones they’ve historically never been able to address.**\n\n### 🤔 Why Can’t Companies Answer “Why” Questions?\n\n**The existing enterprise data operation workflow is unscalable.**\n\n1. Data teams receive **10-15** adhoc requests per day\n2. Companies spend on average **$10.5 million/year** in data analyst salaries\n3. Data is extremely **messy**\n\n### 👨‍💼📊 Meet Butler: Your AI Data Agent\n\n**The solution:**\n\nButler is an AI agent that organizes the chaos of data.\n\nWe found a new way to **auto-document your data team’s tribal knowledge through generating a data map.** Butler indexes and searches the data map using a AgentMesh Framework.\n\n**Butler helps generate hypotheses, writes the queries to validate those hypotheses, and finds any insights from the queries.**\n\n### 🧠 Butler Continuously Learns\n\nWe use a combination of RAG and GenAI to capture any feedback users give to support future context for Butler.\n\n![butler](https://docs.kater.ai/assets/images/waiter-6e843699197199c6685ab6d5c536f743.png)\n\n[A 30-second Demo:](https://youtu.be/hiF-F0W61Dw)\n\n### 🔗 The Set Up Process:\n\n1. Simply **connect** Kater’s website to your data warehouse.\n2. We’ll **auto-generate descriptions** for all your tables and columns, and immediately start building the **data map** for you.\n3. After you verify the data map is correct, in **less than 10 minutes**, you can start asking questions about your data and training Butler.\n\n### 🙏 Our Ask\n\nWe currently support connections with Snowflake, Bigquery, and Microsoft SQL Server. If you have any of these (of even if you don’t, we can build a connector in 1 hour) and want to be able to query your data using English, reach out to us at [support@kater.ai](mailto:support@kater.ai)!","slug":"KXi-kater-ask-data-questions-in-plain-english","created_at":"2024-03-01T23:07:40.847Z","updated_at":"2026-05-25T00:27:31.429Z","total_vote_count":32,"url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/KXi-kater-ask-data-questions-in-plain-english","share_image_url":"//bookface-static.ycombinator.com/assets/ycdc/yc-og-image-c440a0ad1dacfb86eeeb343717479cc54d256614449b4ef719977a0a451f8bc8.png","company":{"id":29507,"name":"kater.ai","slug":"kater-ai","url":"https://www.kater.ai","logo":"https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/8e4c3ef97e004d2c1c5507c262401d7ad2a716ab.png","batch":"Winter 2024","industry":"B2B","tags":["Artificial Intelligence","Analytics","Data Engineering"],"search_path":"https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/29507"}}