Dashboards and AI: seeing what happens in a network, and understanding why

Moritz Arendt, Head of Product, presented the intelligence layer of the Open Social platform at the Summit '26: Lumina Insights for analytics and Gaia AI for search and moderation. The discussion that followed raised a useful question. If AI can answer questions about data, do we still need dashboards?

Why dashboards still matter

Erik Ballhausen of the European Commission's EACEA gave a clear answer. Reporting and audits need consistency. Auditors want to see what an organisation decided to track, and that it tracks it the same way over time. When several communities are managed by different people, shared dashboards give everyone the same view. A dashboard gives the same answer to the same question every time, and for compliance that consistency matters.

Lumina Insights

Lumina Insights shows what is happening across a community, its organisations and groups, and its content: active members, sign ups, participation and contribution rates, and the content people engage with. An audit log records every event on the platform, including single sign on, logins and account deprovisioning, so organisations can trace who did what and when.

IATA was the first organisation to run Lumina in production. Airlines and ground handling providers maintain detailed profiles on IATA's platform, and a dedicated dashboard now shows which organisations have completed and published theirs. One view highlights organisations that have filled in every required field but not yet published, so the IATA team knows exactly whom to help.

Where AI adds value

AI is useful for questions dashboards are not designed to answer, such as what the most active members have in common. It helps explore the "why"; dashboards report the "what".

Gaia AI applies the same principle. Ask Gaia sits alongside the platform's search. Members can ask a question in plain language and receive a short answer with links to the sources, drawn only from content they are allowed to see. It helps people find knowledge in places search alone can miss, such as a document attached to a discussion years ago, and leads them back to the resources and conversations behind it.

Gaia also supports moderation. As AI makes spam easier to produce, Gaia scores new posts and comments for relevance in their context, and site managers set the thresholds for blocking, holding for review or publishing.

Using AI responsibly

AI shifts work as well as saving it. Output needs reviewing, settings need adjusting as an organisation changes, and rollouts work best one group at a time. Gaia uses only content the member can see, keeps its search index with the client's platform, does not use client data for training, and labels AI answers clearly, in line with the EU AI Act. With input from the European Commission, further transparency and monitoring features are in progress.

Dashboards show what is happening, AI helps explain why, and people make the decisions.

See it for yourself

If you run a network of organisations and want to see how this works in practice, request a demo.