Data MonstersA field guide

The bestiary · The Conjured Slopboard

The Conjured Slopboard avatar

Haunting one data team

Specimen · catalogued monster

The Conjured Slopboard

A personalised AI dashboard that tells you nothing

1Data teams haunted

17 of 22On the leaderboard

A gelatinous heap of auto-generated tiles that oozes into every workspace the moment someone asks for a dashboard. It glistens with confident charts, colours and summaries, and leaves everyone exactly as uninformed as before.

Symptoms

  • Charts nobody asked for, generated for everyone
  • Every tile is up 12% compared with nothing
  • Summaries that politely restate the chart titles
  • A dashboard per person, and no two agree
  • Decisions still made from the old spreadsheet

Weakness

Start from the decision, not the data: name the one question each view must answer, then pin it to agreed definitions and a few trusted metrics. A dashboard that answers one real question beats a hundred that answer none.

Overheard in the corridor

  • “It looks amazing. What is it actually telling us?”
  • “The AI built me a dashboard and I have no idea why”
  • “Mine says revenue is up. Yours says it's down.”
  • “Can someone just send me the numbers in a table?”