How does the Analyst agent investigate a question on its own?
The Analyst agent investigates on its own by breaking your question into steps, running its own queries, examining the results, and following the evidence further — checking, slicing and cross-referencing data without you steering each move. It returns a reasoned, cited findings summary, not just a single number.
A normal query answers exactly what you asked. The Analyst agent goes further: you give it a goal — "why did margins drop last quarter" — and it runs an investigation.
Working autonomously, it:
- Plans an approach and decomposes the question into the queries needed to answer it.
- Runs and reads its own queries, then forms follow-ups based on what it finds — drilling into a segment, comparing periods, or checking a suspicious figure.
- Cross-references sources so a finding in one system can be confirmed or explained by another.
- Builds supporting charts and tables as evidence along the way.
- Writes up findings with the reasoning and the citations that back each conclusion.
Everything it concludes is traceable to source rows, so an autonomous investigation never becomes a black box — you can audit every step. It's the difference between getting a number and getting an explanation. Use it to investigate anomalies, reconcile figures that disagree across systems, or do the kind of open-ended digging that would otherwise take an analyst hours, and have it come back with a structured, verifiable answer.
Updated 2026-06-22