You've got data sitting in Snowflake, BigQuery or Salesforce, and you need an answer now, not a ticket to the data team. Until this week the choice was wait for a new dashboard or learn SQL. Claude shipped a feature called Dashboards that does this as a conversation, plus Motion, which turns the result into a short animation for a deck.
In this guide: how to connect it, how to ask, and how to turn the one chart that matters into something you can drop into a presentation in minutes.
Step 1: Connect Claude to your data source
Dashboards connects to platforms like BigQuery, Databricks, Snowflake or Salesforce. You set up the connection in Claude's settings, and you'll usually need sign-off from whoever owns access to that source, not just your own login.
Step 2: Ask for the dashboard in plain words
No query to write. Say what you want to see and why, and Claude builds the dashboard and shows the query behind every number, so you can check it.
Step 3: Keep asking, don't rebuild
The dashboard refreshes on its own as new data lands, and you keep asking follow-up questions in plain language, like a conversation, not a form.
Step 4, bonus: turn the chart that matters into an animation with Motion
Motion takes a chart or diagram and turns it into a short animation you edit like code, not like video, so changing a number doesn't mean reshooting anything. Anthropic's own team says don't hold back on the brief: Robert Bye wrote that it's worth giving the system a bigger ask than you think it can handle.
Wait, before you start
Dashboards is in beta for paid plans, and Motion is limited to Team and Enterprise. Before you connect anything sensitive, like a CRM with customer details, check with whoever owns access there, don't connect it just because you can.
Drew Fallon, CEO of Iris Finance, used Motion to put together an animated product demo and said: “A year ago, this would cost tens of thousands of dollars. Insane.” That's not a promise, that's one real result.
Next ten minutes: pick one number you check every week at work, connect its source in Claude, and ask for a first dashboard.