Google BigQuery Conversational Analytics reaches general availability

Full analysis

Google Cloud has moved Conversational Analytics in BigQuery to general availability (GA), enabling both technical and business users to query data, run multi-step analyses, and generate visual reports using plain-language prompts — no SQL required. The feature is powered by Google's Gemini models (Google's family of large language models) and is built directly into BigQuery Studio with no setup needed. It supports cross-cloud data sources including Databricks Unity, AWS Glue, SAP, and Salesforce, and now guarantees EU/US data residency for both stored data and ML processing.

The GA release introduces agentic (autonomous, multi-step) capabilities: a 'deep-dive mode' where the agent autonomously builds an analytical plan and runs a full investigation, and scheduled agentic workflows that monitor data and deliver proactive reports (e.g., a daily anomaly detection summary). Trust and explainability features include visible reasoning steps, SQL inspection before execution, source citations, and long-term memory so users don't have to repeat context. Governance controls inherit BigQuery's existing permissions model, with added support for customer-managed encryption keys, VPC service controls, and per-agent query-size caps.