I used to be a data visualization expert. I’m not sure I still am.
When Anthropic published an article about how AI is transforming their engineers’ work, I ran this prompt:
Suggest how the following engineer productivity patterns can be illustrated using interactive animated charts, graphs, or infographics.
Be diverse. Xenographics are welcome. Novel animation* / *interaction styles, artistry, xenographics, and diverse chart types are encouraged.
Be intuitive. A single glance should tell them exactly what insight we are trying to convey.
Its suggestions were better than mine.
Gemini 3 Pro was the best, followed by Claude (Opus/Sonnet 4.5) and then ChatGPT (GPT 5.2). They came up with:
- a Throughput Flow showing commits as particles, going from a trickle to a stream
- a Knowledge Neural Net where an engineer’s mental model transforms from isolated clusters into a dense mesh
- a Dark Matter Radar detecting invisible tasks, a Feedback Pulse, a polyomino task stacking
- … and more.
I have ~20 years of professional data visualization experience. I teach it. And these AIs just casually suggested more creative visualization ideas in 10-30 minutes than I probably would have come up with in a day.
This cost less than $2. The new per-day-rate for my expertise, I guess.
Luckily: my expertise has two parts.
- Part 1: Ideating innovative visualizations.
- Part 2: Selecting the right one for the job.
AI’s better at ideation. It’s fast and can generate creative ideas faster than I can sketch on a whiteboard. It knows xenographics and every visualization ever made and can recombine them in novel ways.
I’m better at selection. For now. Knowing which visualization requires knowing the audience, context, and intent. It requires taste (accumulated wisdom from showing the wrong chart to the wrong audience enough times).
But still, since AI can ideate, anyone can create innovative visualizations. No 20-years of experience, reading Edward Tufte’s books, or comparing a violin plot and a beeswarm. Just tell the story and AI will suggest ten creative ways to tell it. Take your pick.
I’m no longer a bottleneck.
Naveen Gattu - you asked me to clone myself. 10 years later, here’re the recipe: https://sanand0.github.io/datastories/anthropic-work/