Chat With Your Data: Introducing FireIQ

Enterprise data is everywhere. It lives in relational databases, behind APIs, buried in documents, scattered across data warehouses. The answers your business needs are in there somewhere, but getting to them has always required knowing SQL, understanding complex schemas, and navigating a maze of data sources. For most people in an organization, the data might as well not exist.

FireIQ changes that. Available today on the FireFoundry Marketplace, FireIQ is an AI-powered conversational business intelligence solution that lets anyone ask questions of their data in plain English and get answers backed by real queries against real databases. No SQL required. No guessing which table holds the information you need.

What is FireIQ?

FireIQ is a conversational BI platform purpose-built for the enterprise. It ships as two complementary applications that together cover the full spectrum of data interaction:

• Chat Application -- The primary interface for business users. Ask questions in natural language, get answers drawn directly from your databases. Whether you want to know last quarter's revenue by region, which products are trending, or how customer churn compares year-over-year, you simply ask. FireIQ translates your question into a precise query, runs it, and presents the results with clear explanations and visualizations.
• Data Analysis Application -- A companion tool for data teams focused on data preparation and cleansing. Upload datasets, detect anomalies, standardize formats, and prepare clean data for downstream consumption. This is where raw data becomes reliable data, powered by AI-assisted transformations that would otherwise take hours of manual work.

Both applications are available on the FireFoundry Marketplace and integrate natively with the FireFoundry platform, inheriting its security model, observability, and operational guarantees.

How It Works

The experience is deceptively simple. A user opens the Chat Application, types a question, and gets an answer. But under the hood, a sophisticated pipeline is doing the heavy lifting.

Step 1: Natural language understanding. The user asks a question in plain English -- something like "What were our top 10 customers by revenue last quarter?" FireIQ parses the intent, identifies the entities (customers, revenue), the aggregation (top 10), and the time range (last quarter).

Step 2: Semantic query translation. This is where the Data Access Service comes in. Rather than blindly generating SQL, FireIQ consults your organization's data dictionary and business ontology to understand what "revenue" actually means in your context, which tables contain customer data, and how "last quarter" maps to your fiscal calendar. The result is a precise, optimized query tailored to your specific data model.

Step 3: Query execution. The generated query runs against your actual databases. FireIQ supports over 12 backend databases out of the box, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks, ClickHouse, MariaDB, CockroachDB, and more. Your data never leaves your environment.

Step 4: Results and explanation. Results come back with context. FireIQ does not just hand you a table of numbers. It explains what the query did, highlights key insights, and renders appropriate visualizations -- bar charts for comparisons, line charts for trends, tables for detailed breakdowns.

Step 5: Custom transformations with FaaS. Need to apply business-specific logic that goes beyond standard SQL? FireFoundry's Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) layer lets you define custom data transformations -- currency conversions, scoring models, normalization rules -- that FireIQ can invoke as part of the query pipeline.

Step 6: Interactive dashboards with Widget-as-a-Service. Once you have a query that delivers value, Widget-as-a-Service turns it into a reusable, interactive dashboard component. These widgets can be composed into full dashboards and shared across your organization.

The Data Access Service Difference

Plenty of tools claim to translate natural language to SQL. Most of them produce queries that are technically correct but semantically wrong -- they might query the right table but misunderstand what a column actually represents in your business context. This is the problem the Data Access Service was built to solve.

The Data Access Service is the semantic brain of FireIQ. It maintains a deep understanding of your data through four key capabilities:

• Data dictionary integration. The AI understands what your columns and tables actually mean, not just their technical names. A column called cust_ltv_adj is not a mystery -- the data dictionary tells FireIQ it represents "Customer Lifetime Value (Adjusted for Returns)."
• Business ontology awareness. Every organization has its own vocabulary. When your sales team says "qualified lead," it means something specific. The business ontology maps domain-specific terminology to data structures, ensuring that questions asked in business language produce technically accurate queries.
• Fine-grained access control. Different users should see different data. A regional manager asking about revenue should only see their region. An executive should see everything. The Data Access Service enforces row-level and column-level access controls, so the same question produces appropriately scoped results depending on who is asking.
• Query optimization and transparency. FireIQ does not just run queries -- it explains them. Users can see the generated SQL, understand why particular tables were joined, and get performance insights. For data teams, this transparency builds trust and makes it easy to verify that the AI is doing the right thing.

Building BI Dashboards

The Chat Application is powerful for ad-hoc questions, but many organizations need persistent dashboards that update in real time. FireIQ delivers this through a composable dashboard architecture built on two FireFoundry platform services.

FaaS functions for custom metrics. Define reusable data transformations as serverless functions. Calculate custom KPIs, apply business rules, aggregate across data sources -- all encapsulated as functions that can be invoked by FireIQ or embedded in dashboards.

Widget-as-a-Service for interactive components. Turn any query or function into an interactive UI widget. Charts, tables, scorecards, filters -- each widget is a self-contained component with its own data source, refresh interval, and interaction model.

Compose widgets into dashboards. Arrange widgets on a canvas to build comprehensive dashboards. Widgets can interact with each other -- filtering one chart updates related visualizations. Dashboards support drill-down, cross-filtering, and dynamic date ranges.

Share across your organization. Publish dashboards to teams, departments, or the entire company. Role-based access controls ensure that each viewer sees only the data they are authorized to access, even when viewing the same dashboard.

Enterprise Ready

FireIQ is not a toy for small-scale experiments. It is built for enterprise deployment with the governance, security, and operational features that large organizations require.

• Data governance and access control. Every query respects your organization's data policies. Row-level security, column masking, and role-based access are enforced at the query layer, not just the UI layer. Sensitive data stays protected regardless of how it is accessed.
• Audit logging for all queries. Every question asked, every query generated, every result returned is logged with full context: who asked, when, what data was accessed, and how results were used. This audit trail supports compliance requirements and helps data teams understand usage patterns.
• Multi-tenant by design. FireIQ supports multiple teams, departments, and business units with complete data isolation. Each tenant has its own data dictionary, ontology, and access policies. This makes it suitable for large enterprises with complex organizational structures as well as service providers managing multiple clients.
• Runs in your FireFoundry environment. FireIQ deploys as a marketplace application within your existing FireFoundry infrastructure. There is no separate infrastructure to manage, no data leaving your environment, and no additional security perimeter to defend. It inherits all of FireFoundry's operational capabilities including monitoring, scaling, and high availability.

Getting Started

FireIQ is available today on the FireFoundry Marketplace. Getting started takes minutes, not months.

Install FireIQ from the marketplace, connect your databases, configure your data dictionary and ontology, and your team can start asking questions immediately. FireIQ includes starter templates for common data models and can auto-discover schema metadata to accelerate setup.

FireIQ is available as a marketplace application on the FireFoundry platform. Pricing details will be announced as we exit beta. Request a demo to see FireIQ in action with your own data and discuss pricing options for your organization.