Have you ever asked a simple question — “how many customers do we have?” — and got three different answers?

I have. Sales said one number, finance said another, and the founder pulled up a dashboard that disagreed with both. Nobody was wrong. They were each looking at a different system, with a slightly different definition. We’d been making decisions on those numbers for months.

I came across a thread on a BI sub the other week. An analyst had put two team dashboards side-by-side. Both had a “Revenue” column. The numbers didn’t match. He looked into it: “Two analysts had written two different calculations for ‘Revenue.’ One was gross. The other was net. Neither was wrong. They just never agreed on a single definition.”

That’s the boring version of the problem. The newer version is in another thread from r/analytics — three weeks old, 426 upvotes — where the OP’s CEO killed the BI tool and told everyone to “just ask Claude” for the numbers instead.…