Looker

Looker is Google Cloud's enterprise BI platform, acquired by Google in 2019 for $2.6 billion. It takes a different approach to business intelligence — rather than connecting directly to data and building charts, Looker centers on LookML, a modeling layer that defines business metrics semantically.

## The LookML Modeling Approach

In Looker, a data analyst (or data engineer) defines business metrics in LookML: what "revenue" means, how to calculate "customer lifetime value," what the "active users" metric includes. Once defined, these metrics are available to any user across any report or dashboard — consistent, governed, and always calculated the same way. This eliminates the problem of different teams calculating the same metric differently.

## Gemini in Looker

Google's Gemini AI is integrated throughout Looker: - **Conversational analytics**: Ask questions in natural language, get visualizations - **Looker Assistant**: Chat with your data, follow-up questions, iterative analysis - **Formula suggestions**: AI suggests LookML expressions and calculated fields - **Insight summaries**: AI-generated narratives for dashboards - **Anomaly detection**: Automatic alerts when metrics deviate from expected patterns

## Embedded Analytics

Looker's embedded analytics allows companies to build data products on top of Looker's infrastructure — serving analytics to their customers through their own product UI. Many SaaS companies power their reporting features with Looker.

## Google Cloud Integration

Looker integrates natively with BigQuery, Cloud Spanner, and the broader Google Cloud ecosystem. For companies already on GCP, Looker is the natural BI choice.

## Pricing

Looker Standard starts at $5,000/month. Platform pricing includes unlimited users for viewing; developers and data modelers are separately priced. Enterprise pricing is custom and typically $100k+/year for larger deployments.