Domo drives customer excitement with latest AI capabilities

Transformative capabilities

Though Domo has long provided certain data platform capabilities that distinguished it from strict analytics specialists, the vendor has largely specialized in business intelligence with capabilities that enable users to prepare and analyze data. However, like peers including Qlik and ThoughtSpot, Domo over the past few years has responded to surging customer interest in AI development by delivering capabilities designed to simplify the complex process.

Coming into Domopalooza, I had a perception of Domo being a dashboard company. After [the conference], seeing what they're doing, what I'm leaving with is a paradigm shift for me personally. I see a company that is not just talking about AI but being at the forefront of AI integration. I was floored.

For example, in 2023, about 10 months after OpenAI's November 2022 launch of ChatGPT marked significant improvement in generative AI (GenAI) technology and spurred enterprises to start investing more heavily in AI development, the vendor unveiled Domo AI, a suite of tools aimed at simplifying GenAI development.

In March 2024, Domo made some the features unveiled the prior year generally available, including AI Chat and Universal Models. And the following March, Domo launched Agent Catalyst, a toolkit aimed at enabling customers to build agents.

Since then, some Domo customers have successfully developed agents, with numerous users demonstrating the agents they've built using Domo's AI and Data Products Platform during the vendor's recent user conference.

But they represent the exception.

Despite the emphasis many enterprises now place on AI development, and despite feature sets such as Agent Catalyst from data management and analytics vendors designed to make it easier for customers to build complex AI applications, most AI initiatives never make it past the pilot stage. A 2025 study from MIT shows that 95% of organizations are getting no return on their investments in AI development.

As a result, throughout 2026 to date, numerous vendors have added capabilities to their AI development suites aimed at helping their customers more successfully build agents. In particular, they have added tools designed to enable agents to access data that gives them the proper context to carry out their intended tasks.

For example, Databricks launched Instructed Retriever to improve data retrieval over traditional retrieval-augmented generation systems, MongoDB added new embedding and re-ranking models to similarly address data retrieval, and GoodData and Pentaho have unveiled improved context layers.

Now, Domo is among them.

"Trust is a gap Domo wants to help close [so customers] can turn AI from a tool into a business partner," Domo chief technology officer and executive vice president of product Daren Thayne said during Domopalooza's closing session.

In addition to its MCP server, Domo unveiled an AI Library for users to curate and manage their AI tools, AI Agent Builder so customers can more easily build conversational agents, and AI Toolkits to help users combine relevant data and AI workflows to better define an agent's purpose and how it executes its prescribed tasks.

Beyond features that foster AI development, Domo also introduced new governance capabilities such as User Impersonation -- which enables authorized administrators to view and interact with Domo's AI and Data Products Platform as another user to diagnose problems related to a specific user's permissions -- that give admins better control over their organization's data.

Sony Interactive Entertainment is one of the Domo customers able to develop agents before the latest features were unveiled. However, the new features add depth and breadth to Domo's AI development environment and will enable Sony Interactive Entertainment to broaden its agentic AI development initiatives, according to Tom Whipple, the company's senior security analytics engineer.

"I'd say it's exciting," he said. "[The new capabilities] are following the roadmap of what we want to do in our Domo instance. It's right in line with what we're hoping we can do really soon."

Like Sony Interactive Entertainment, InformData, a data provider for security and background checks, is a Domo customer that has successfully developed agentic AI capabilities, building an agent that enables users to query and analyze data with natural language processing.

Nevertheless, Marcus Wilkins, the company's lead data scientist, was excited by what he saw from Domo during the vendor's conference.

"It's absolutely integral to Domo's continued success," he said. "I think MCP is definitely the direction they need to be heading. I know there's a lot of debate right now about exploring different methodologies about MCP tools, but MCP has a lot of buy-in from a lot of AI providers that are interested in its continued success for their own consumption."

Agents of change

Although the AI development and governance capabilities Domo unveiled during its user conference are not yet generally available, they are available to customers to try out. Within 24 hours of their introduction, Gunn already reaped their benefit.

Working with an expert from Domo, Gunn built an agent in less than 30 minutes that will take on time-consuming operational tasks related to each of Extu's customers that previously had to be performed by humans. Some quick calculations revealed that the agent will save Extu hundreds of thousands of dollars in operational costs over the next few months and millions of dollars within six months.

"This is something I've been trying to do for over a year, and [we] did it in less than 28 minutes," Gunn said. "I couldn't believe it."

One key aspect of Extu's new agent is Domo's integration with Claude, a large language model from Anthropic that can be combined with an organization's proprietary data to build AI tools that understand the organization's unique characteristics.

"The Claude integration that they have is just next level," Gunn said.

While Gunn built an agent that will help transform Extu's operations almost immediately after Domo made its latest capabilities available to users in preview, customers such as Stanford Credit Union's Pattanaik and Sony Interactive Entertainment's Whipple are now plotting AI development initiatives.

Sony Interactive Entertainment is part of the 5% -- according to MIT's report -- that has been able to get a return on their investments in AI development. The new Domo features, including App Catalyst, a tool within the vendor's AI and Data Products Platform that enables users to create pro-code tools using natural language, will allow Sony Interactive Entertainment to scale its agentic AI network.

"It should help, for sure [by] making workflows easier to get started," Whipple said. "They announced App Catalyst, and that should help the whole creation process. It's more user friendly, and faster iterations on your workflows, so I think that will help us."

In fact, the features Domo is promising to deliver go beyond what Whipple anticipated.

"They keep pushing things forward in ways that maybe we weren't even thinking of," he said. "This is over several years. They just seem to be either in line with what the industry needs, or sometimes ahead, and it opens my mind to, 'We can do this new thing now that we've never been able to do before in Domo.' I feel like they consistently do that and have for a long time."

Pattanaik, who used IBM's Cognos platform for analytics before switching to Domo in a move that enabled Stanford Credit Union to reduce the complexity of its data workflow by eliminating the need for database and extract, transform and load platforms, has similarly been pleased with Domo's evolution.

However, unlike Sony Interactive Entertainment, Stanford Federal Credit Union has not yet put any agents into production. Connectivity to appropriate data sources was a hindrance that Domo's MCP server will eliminate.

Once able to start using the MCP server, plans are to build agents similar to the agent built by InformData's Wilkins, that enable Stanford Federal Credit Union workers to quickly query and analyze data in ways that are not otherwise possible, according to Pattanaik.

"In our space, data is not very well-defined or documented, so finding answers sometimes takes time, even with Domo," he said. "Now, users will be able to ask questions of their Domo agent and get answers."

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Wish list

One of the reasons users come to vendor conferences is to see the latest and greatest new capabilities that their provider of choice has in the works and calibrate whether the vendor's direction is in line with their own.

Domopalooza is no different.

The Domo customers had features in mind that they hoped that the vendor would unveil. And for the most part, Domo delivered what customers wanted.

"I was pretty focused this year," Wilkins said. "I wanted to see either pure MCP like they announced, or a Domo-ized proprietary version of it on their internal platform -- something that allowed the features they offer to communicate with the AI layer. That's what I was looking for."

Whipple was similarly satisfied.

"I think they're actually doing a great job," he said. "The things they announced weren't necessarily what we were looking for, but they will make things easier and nicer for our experience in building and in using Domo. I can't think of anything major [that is missing]."

If there's one thing Gunn would have liked, it's examples that demonstrate not just the agents that customers are building with Domo, but how those customers are deploying the agents in real-world scenarios. Extu's industry has not changed much during Gunn's 18-year tenure with the company, so seeing how companies in other industries are using agents could serve as a guide.

"I would love to see real-world use cases that show how different industries are using Domo, how once all of these features are adopted, how different industries are using them to grow and think outside the box of what they've traditionally done," she said. "Channel marketing is a very traditional, dated industry. … I haven't seen a lot of change, so I would love to see how other industries are adapting."

Pattanaik, meanwhile, noted that AI is evolving so quickly that it's difficult to know what features to hope Domo adds to its AI and Data Products Platform.

GenAI was the dominant trend in AI in the immediate aftermath of ChatGPT's late 2022 launch and remained the focus of most enterprise AI initiatives into 2024. But then agentic AI emerged that year, and since then, enterprises have been intent on developing autonomous agents. Without knowledge of what might come next, it's difficult to hope for any specific new capabilities.

"With the AI world, everything is moving so fast that you don't know what you don't know," Pattanaik said.

Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget and a journalist with more than three decades of experience. He covers analytics and data management.