Premier, a multi-location operating company, engaged New Clarity to let its managers ask questions about company performance in plain language and get answers directly from the data warehouse. Before the project, an answer meant a request to the reporting team, a wait of about a week, and a static report that covered only the question as first asked. New Clarity built a workflow that turns a plain-language question into a database query, returns the figures with the query behind them, and keeps the conversation going so a follow-up question does not start the process over.
Data sat in one warehouse, but reaching it took a specialist. One-off analysis meant exporting to spreadsheets and combining datasets by hand. Shared reporting meant a request to the reporting team, a wait while a report was built, and an output that answered only predefined questions. Insight typically took about a week, follow-up questions restarted the cycle, and the engineers who maintained the warehouse spent much of their time answering questions instead of improving the system. Leaders asked questions while working through a decision; by the time the answer came back, the moment had passed.
A conversational workflow over the company's own data warehouse. It translates a business question into a database query using the company's schema, its definitions of key measures such as revenue and margin, and a library of roughly fifty real questions paired with validated queries and expected answers, so the workflow uses the company's numbers the way the company defines them. It keeps context across a conversation, so a manager can move from a headline figure to the breakdown behind it without restating the question. Results come back as a direct figure, a table, or a chart generated from the same query, and can be exported for further work.
Every user has a role, and each role is tied to the datasets it may see, so wide adoption did not mean wide access. Every answer carries the query that produced it, so a figure can be checked against its source rather than taken on trust. The company found that the main driver of accuracy was not the model but the time spent refining how the workflow interprets its questions, and it improves through recorded use and feedback. The workflow runs inside the company's own environment.
Time to an answer fell from about a week to minutes. Managers now explore performance data themselves, most manual queries and spreadsheet analysis are gone, and the reporting team is no longer interrupted by routine requests. The people who benefited most were the operating managers who had frequent questions and no direct access to the data.
The same workflow fits a fund's own reporting and its portfolio companies' data: a question about fees, capital calls or portfolio performance answered from the system of record, with access limited by role and every answer traceable to the query behind it. An operating company's data warehouse is exactly the kind of system a fund manager's team is asked about by investors and examiners, and this is how it can be answered with a record.