The Buyer's Scorecard for Agentic Analytics: Evaluating Tooling in the Enterprise AI Era

This article provides a detailed buyer's scorecard for evaluating agentic analytics tools in the enterprise AI era. It outlines eight key categories for assessment: semantic grounding, data access and openness, governance and identity, validation and evaluation, action controls, observability and auditability, cost and workload management, and interoperability. The author emphasizes moving beyond impressive demos to assess production readiness, including how tools handle disputed metrics, restricted data, and imprecise user queries. The scorecard is vendor-neutral but leans toward an open lakehouse architecture, offering practical questions, red flags, and pilot guidance for IT and technology buyers.