Over the past year, I've been looking at analytics agents and a new generation of business intelligence tools. I've reviewed 10+ products, mostly from the perspective of a high-growth startup, where speed, trust, and compounding decisions matter.
One thing stood out: in the age of vibe coding and prompt-to-product, demos matter more than ever. When prototypes are cheap, the demo becomes the proof. What matters isn't how polished it looks, but how real it feels.
From what I've seen, demo effectiveness follows a loose hierarchy. The driver isn't sophisticated. It's freedom: how much room the user has to explore and play.
The hierarchy goes something like this:
Real data, in a sandbox with full freedom: a connected warehouse or finance dataset where users can run their own questions, tweak filters, and follow their intuition. They're not testing the demo — they're testing their thinking.
Almost-real data (customer-provided or clearly instructed), still in a sandbox: a trimmed version of the customer's schema, or a well-defined scenario like "last quarter's orders with known anomalies." It's not perfect, but it maps cleanly to reality.
"Demo-massaged" data (iykyk), but hands-on: clean tables, ideal joins, edge cases quietly removed. As long as users can click around, break assumptions, and ask off-script questions, it can still work.
"Demo-massaged" data, watch-only: a recorded walkthrough showing how an agent answers pre-selected questions. It proves capability, but not reliability.
"Demo-massaged" data, shown after a 10-minute deck in a live meeting: slides on vision and architecture first, demo last. By then, the user is evaluating claims, not discovering value.
Each step down makes the demo feel less real. More staged. Easier to doubt.
To be fair, there are good reasons for this. Security matters. Data access is hard. Custom demos take time. Prep is expensive. Compliance is slow. And not every lead earns that investment.
But when you do make it, it pays off. It builds trust faster, shortens sales cycles, and lets the product speak for itself.
In a world where anyone can prompt their way to a prototype, the strongest demo isn't the most polished one. It's the one that lets users explore like it's already theirs.