How to Create a Business Dashboard in Looker with AI
Staring at a blank canvas in Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) can feel intimidating. You know the valuable insights are buried in your Google Analytics, spreadsheets, and ad platforms, but translating them into a clear dashboard takes time and technical skill. This guide shows you how to use Looker Studio's built-in AI to get from data to dashboard much faster, letting you build reports by simply describing what you want to see.
Why Bother with AI in Looker Studio?
Business dashboards are essential for tracking performance, but building them has always been a manual process of dragging, dropping, and configuring charts. Integrating AI into this workflow isn't just a gimmick, it's about making data analysis more accessible and efficient. It changes the focus from "how do I build this chart?" to "what question do I want to answer?"
Go from "What if?" to "Here it is" in Seconds
Normally, getting an answer to a new business question involves a series of clicks and configurations. You have to select a chart type, drag in your dimensions and metrics, set date ranges, and apply filters. With AI, you can bypass those steps. You just type what you need - like "show me a bar chart of our top 5 revenue-generating products this month" - and Looker Studio builds the chart for you, instantly turning your questions into answers.
Lower the Learning Curve
Let's be honest: tools like Looker Studio, Power BI, and Tableau are powerful but have a steep learning curve. Becoming truly proficient can take hours of tutorials. AI drastically flattens that curve. Instead of needing to know the specific names of every metric and dimension or where every setting is located, you can use plain English. This empowers everyone on your team, not just the data specialists, to build their own reports and find the insights they need to do their jobs better.
Overcome the "Blank Canvas" Problem
One of the hardest parts of creating a new dashboard is simply getting started. AI is the perfect thought-starter. It can help you quickly generate initial charts and key performance indicators (KPIs) to seed your report. Once you have a few core visuals on the page, it's much easier to arrange, refine, and build upon them until you have a complete dashboard.
Preparation: Connect Your Data Sources First
Before AI can work its magic, it needs data to work with. Your first step inside any Looker Studio report is to connect it to the sources where your business information lives. The AI reads the structure of your connected data (like column names and data types) to understand your prompts.
For most businesses, the most common data sources you'll start with are:
Google Analytics 4: Essential for understanding your website traffic, user behavior, and conversion funnels.
Google Sheets: The ultimate flexible data source. Perfect for tracking budgets, compiling data from platforms that don't have a direct connector, or managing custom lists.
Google Ads: A must-have for tracking your paid advertising campaign performance, including clicks, impressions, cost, and conversions.
To add a data source, open your Looker Studio report, go to Resource > Manage added data sources > Add A Data Source, and select the connector you want. Once you authorize access, the data will be available to both you and the AI assistant in your report.
Using "Help me create": Your AI Chart Builder
Looker Studio's primary AI feature is a component called "Help me create." You can think of it as a conversational chart generator. Instead of using the traditional chart-building panel, you describe the chart you want in a text box, and Looker Studio generates it for you. It won't build an entire multi-page dashboard from one prompt, but it's brilliant for quickly creating the individual charts and graphs that make up a dashboard.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Your First AI-Generated Chart
Let's build a simple website traffic chart using data from Google Analytics 4. Once your GA4 property is connected, follow these steps.
1. Add a New Chart and Find the AI Option
From the toolbar at the top of your report, click Insert > Chart with "Help me create". This will open up a panel for your AI prompt instead of the usual chart settings.
2. Write a Clear and Specific Prompt
This is where the magic happens. Your prompt needs to tell Looker Studio what to show and how to show it. A good prompt includes three key elements:
The Metric: What number do you want to measure? (e.g., Sessions, Total Users, Conversions)
The Dimension: How do you want to group or categorize that number? (e.g., by Country, by Device, over Time)
The Chart Type (optional but helpful): How should it be visualized? (e.g., as a time series chart, as a bar chart, as a map)
Let's try a prompt to see our website sessions over the last 90 days.
As you type, the AI will suggest metrics and dimensions from your data source to help you write a valid prompt. Once you're happy with it, click "Create," and the chart will appear on your dashboard canvas.
3. Review and Refine the Chart Manually
The AI gets you 80-90% of the way there, providing a correctly configured chart. But finishing touches often require some manual tweaking. You can now click on your newly generated chart to open the standard Setup and Style panels. Here you can:
Change colors, fonts, and background themes.
Rename the chart title to something more descriptive.
Add or remove chart elements like grid lines or data labels.
Apply additional filters that might have been too complex for the initial prompt.
Think of the AI as your analyst assistant who does the heavy lifting, leaving the final presentation tweaks to you.
Example Workflow: Building a High-Level Marketing Dashboard
Using this prompt-and-refine method, you can assemble a complete dashboard, one piece at a time. Here’s how you could quickly build a marketing overview dashboard:
Chart 1: KPI ScorecardsStart with the most important numbers. Open the "Help me create" panel and prompt:
Scorecard with Sessions, Engaged Sessions and Total Users for the last 28 days
This will give you three KPI cards. Arrange them at the top of your report.
Chart 2: Traffic Trend Over TimeNext, visualize the trend behind those numbers. Create a new chart and prompt:
Line chart of Sessions by Date for this quarter
Place this large chart below your KPI scorecards so you can see daily performance.
Chart 3: Top Traffic ChannelsFind out where your traffic is coming from. Prompt:
Bar chart showing the top 5 Session default channel groupings by Sessions
Position this next to your trend chart for more context.
Chart 4: Geographic BreakdownUnderstand your audience's location. A map is perfect for this. Prompt:
A map of users by Country for the past month
Within just a few minutes, you've gone from a blank page to a functional, informative dashboard that helps tell the story of your marketing performance.
Tips for Writing Better Prompts
Be Specific: Vague prompts like "Show traffic" will confuse the AI. Precise prompts like "Show a table of the top 10 landing pages by number of new users" will produce accurate results.
Mention Date Ranges: Always include a time frame like "last _ days," "this quarter," or "this year to date" to get the right data.
Use Chart Type Keywords: Including phrases like "as a bar chart," "table," "pie chart," or "time series" helps the AI choose the right visualization from the start.
Use the "Right" Names: The AI works best when you use the exact names of metrics and dimensions from your data source (e.g., use "Session default channel group" instead of just "channels").
Limitations of Native AI in Looker Studio
While extremely helpful, the "Help me create" feature is best viewed as a powerful assistant, not a fully autonomous analyst. It excels at creating individual charts from a single, well-structured data source. However, it can struggle with more advanced tasks like:
Creating charts from multiple data sources at once. You can't ask it to combine your Facebook Ads spending and Google Analytics sales into one chart directly through a prompt. You'd still need to create a manual data blend first.
Complex calculations or creative visualizations. It works best with standard chart types and direct aggregations (sum, count, average). It won't invent a new type of metric for you on the fly.
Overall dashboard design and layout. The AI generates charts, but it's up to you to arrange them logically on the page to tell a cohesive story.
Final Thoughts
Combining AI with Looker Studio dramatically streamlines the report-building process, turning tedious clicks into simple conversations. It gives analysts their time back and empowers non-technical team members to find their own answers in data without waiting for help. It’s the perfect way to get over the initial hurdle of a blank page and quickly build the foundational charts for any business dashboard.
This AI-assisted, chart-by-chart approach significantly improves the workflow, but we believe the process can be even smoother. At Graphed, we’ve focused on taking this natural language capability a step further. Instead of just creating individual charts, you can describe an entire multi-platform dashboard - say, blending your Facebook Ads spend, GA4 traffic, and Shopify revenue - and we instantly build the complete, interactive report for you. Because we connect directly to all your key sources, your data is always live and your dashboards stay automatically updated, eliminating the manual refresh cycle for good.