The Future of Visualization Dashboards in the Age of Generative AI

Abstract

Generative AI promises easier dashboard creation, raising questions about the future of dashboards and the people who create and use them. We interviewed 16 experts based in 14 countries about their practices and expectations. Almost all expected dashboards to persist for recurring questions, monitoring, and reporting. They anticipated adaptive views and combinations of language, graphical controls, and gestures, while emphasizing interaction as part of human exploration and understanding. Participants expected authors' responsibilities to shift toward specifying requirements, curating generated work, and evaluating outputs, with design knowledge and communication remaining important. Easier creation also raised concerns about validation effort, users' understanding, maintenance, and personalization weakening shared understanding. We discuss seven opportunities for research and practice concerning validation, end-user education, dashboard proliferation and rot, organizational guidance, adaptation, novel visualizations, and accountability for AI-generated content. Our findings connect dashboard evolution with the human and organizational work needed to sustain their use.