Hello,
With the new AIP releases such as AIP Analyst, we can see a good integration with some features of Foundry, however some other ones seems to be left aside such as Contour.
Contour is one of OG tools but still pretty popular around - particularly for newcomers or non technical individuals - it is a direct competitor to BI Tools (PowerBI, Qlik) but it does not receive as much improvements as other platform apps ?
For example, when working with AIP Analyst, I would like to be able to finalize my analysis with a Contour dashboard so all the work done (tokens spent) can be conclude with an asset.
Right now, I have good analysis done by Analyst but I can only print it in PDF ?
As well, the integration of AIP Assist with Contour is quite weak - a lot of hallucinations and no cross interactivity. In my opinion, only the +++ feature of Expression works well.
Agree. I would love to see more features added to Contour.
I’m currently going through training, and as far as I understand, people generally use Contour in one of two ways:
Overall, Contour is well liked and easy to use. The expression language is powerful, and the visualizations are decent.
That said, I would really love tighter AIP integration, specifically the ability to check, verify, or explain logic and calculations within Contour. At the moment, AIP Assist doesn’t seem able to access Contour’s context, and it can even hallucinate expressions, which limits its usefulness here.
Hey,
Thanks to both of you for sharing this feedback! It’s helpful to hear how you’re using Contour and where the limitations are around AIP integration.
To be transparent, new feature development in Contour isn’t an active area of investment right now, so deeper AIP integrations for Contour specifically aren’t on our near-term roadmap. That said, feedback like this is valuable for understanding pain points and informing how we can prioritize feature requests like this going forward across the analytics suite.
Appreciate you both taking the time to share this.
Thanks for the transparency here, really appreciate the context.
One additional angle from the engineering / analysis workflow side.
Contour is surprisingly strong for debugging, scenario replication, and visually tracing intermediate states during analysis. A lot of us still end up jumping to SQL Console, Code Repositories, or Jupyter notebooks for quick validation, complex joins, edge-case testing, or deterministic logic checks.
A native SQL board inside Contour, along with lightweight AI helpers like expression explanation, join suggestions, downstream impact summaries, or debugging assistance, could make Contour extremely powerful for iterative analyst and engineering workflows without necessarily turning it into full AIP Analyst.
The control and visibility Contour gives today is actually one of its strongest qualities.