Databricks Genie retires the dashboard backlog at Grupo Panvel

Grupo Panvel is one of Brazil's largest pharmacy chains, with a strong presence in the south and a growing digital footprint in São Paulo. Every Monday, its leadership team hit the same wall: a sales question would come up, and no one had the number on hand. Off-script questions meant filing a request with the data team and waiting hours or days for an answer — one that often just opened a new question. Grupo Panvel decided to close that gap with Genie One, integrated with Genie Agents, so leaders could ask questions in natural language and get governed answers in minutes, not days.

Overcoming dashboard limitations in pharmacy retail

Pharmacy retail is one of the most data-intensive forms of retail, and Grupo Panvel operates at that pace across hundreds of physical stores, a robust e-commerce operation, an app that ranks among the most used in pharmacy retail and a health and wellness business that goes beyond selling medicine. High product turnover, expiration dates, seasonality, regulated pricing, a loyalty program, prescriptions and omnichannel behavior all generate data. The challenge was never a shortage of information. It was getting that information to the people who needed it, when they needed it.

Grupo Panvel didn't lack dashboards; it had the opposite problem. Every time the business changed, a new question would arise that the existing dashboards couldn't answer. Someone would then file a request with the BI team. The dashboard catalog kept growing while the old ones sat unused, each one built to answer a single moment in time rather than the next question that would inevitably follow.

"We had a report or a dashboard for almost everything, and that was exactly the problem. The moment a question strayed even a little off script, we were back to filing a ticket," said Max Reis, Data Engineering Specialist at Grupo Panvel.

What Grupo Panvel wanted instead was simple: let people ask a question in Portuguese, the way they'd ask a colleague, like "how did generics sell last week, broken down by store," and get the number and the chart back immediately, without anyone having to build a new dashboard.

Conversational analytics with Genie One and Genie Agents

Grupo Panvel set out to remove the BI bottleneck without sacrificing governance. To do that, it turned to Genie One, integrated with Genie Agents, the conversational analytics capability on the Databricks Data + AI Platform.

Instead of navigating a dashboard, users converse with their data in natural language. Genie converts questions into queries, retrieves data from governed tables and provides immediate answers. It also shows the underlying query for anyone who wants to check it.

Genie One and Genie Agents in action at Grupo Panvel

Specifically in margin analyses, Genie lets Grupo Panvel move from macro to micro within the same conversation. This helps the team get to the root of a potential problem without switching tools or filing a new request.

Seamless integration with existing data and workflows

Three things drove the decision:

• First, Genie sat atop the data Grupo Panvel had already organized, so there was no need to build a separate data store for AI.
• Second, Genie respects the access rules defined in Unity Catalog, so people only see what they're already permitted to see.
• Third, Genie fit where the work was already happening. Rather than launching a new portal, Grupo Panvel embedded Genie via an iframe directly within its internal platform. That way, the ability to ask a question sits right where people already work, with no extra login or tab-switching required.

Grupo Panvel is also using Genie's scheduled tasks functionality, which the team sees as having real potential to replace fixed, recurring reports. Unlike a traditional report, a scheduled Genie output can adapt to changes in scope or in the questions being asked, without the rework that maintaining a static report typically requires.

Building trust through transparency and shared vocabulary

In conversational analytics, transparency is what makes speed usable, especially when decisions depend on the details behind a number. Trust was built in from the start. Genie was configured to show not just the answer but the filters it applied, in plain language. That way, someone who has never written a line of code can check whether the period, region or category matches what they asked for.

As the data team taught Genie Grupo Panvel's business vocabulary, its accuracy improved. Terms like "net sales" and internal shorthand like "PIP" (Prateleira Infinita Panvel, the model where a customer buys at one store and picks up at another) had to be explicitly defined before Genie could use them correctly. Within a few weeks, the share of answers users considered right on the first try rose steadily, and analysts refined those definitions over time.

"The first time Genie got a term wrong, we just added a definition, and it stuck. It started sounding less like a generic AI and more like someone who actually works here," said Max.

Enhancing decision-making with Genie’s real-time insights

Grupo Panvel started small on purpose, rolling Genie out to 20 users across commercial, operations and digital channels. These were mostly leaders and executives who felt the effects of the report queue firsthand. That lean start was strategic. It let the team get fast feedback, track which questions came up and see where Genie needed additional clarity and which business terms still needed to be taught.

The headquarters operations team was among the first to put Genie to active use, applying it to compare branch performance across regions. Because the questions are open-ended rather than limited to a fixed dashboard, the team has surfaced insights about individual stores that previously wouldn't have been on its radar.

The results followed quickly:

• Time required for margin and performance analysis dropped by at least 90%.
• Access to historical sales data expanded from a standard three-year window to more than eight years within the same conversation.
• Over 1,500 questions were fielded from pilot users in the first few months.

Managers no longer depend on the data team to turn a question into an answer, a process that previously took hours or days. Today, a manager can ask the question directly and have what they need within minutes.

Beyond store-level insights, some of those questions have translated into direct impact on the company's margin once identified. Grupo Panvel also expects the shift to free up analysts’ time that used to go toward pulling reports. That time can be redirected toward foundational work such as data modeling, data quality and analysis that drives strategy.

The data team is no longer a bottleneck and instead functions as a support layer, focusing on complex problems rather than one-off requests. The benefit most strongly felt by the data team itself is the ability to create new features: work that once required building or rebuilding an entire dashboard can now be done in minutes, often directly by the business user.

"Genie didn't just speed up our reports; it changed how our leaders think. They stopped waiting for the answer and started finding it themselves," said Max.

For Grupo Panvel, that speed carries competitive weight. Customer behavior, seasonality and market conditions can all shift quickly, and the ability to analyze at the same pace lets the team react before those shifts become problems and catch opportunities that used to take too long to reach.

"People who weren't even in the pilot started asking for access because they'd seen a colleague get an answer in seconds that used to take a day," said Max.

Grupo Panvel now plans to scale Genie from dozens to hundreds of users in the short term. It will eventually extend access to stores, while expanding beyond sales data to include inventory, expenses and logistics. As adoption grows, the goal is a culture where asking the data is a habit, not an event. That means fewer dashboards that exist only to answer one-off questions, and a data team that spends less time pulling reports and more time serving as a strategic partner to the business.