How Bluefield Research uses Sisense Intelligence to deliver smarter, self-service water market analytics

We collect thousands of fragmented data points, including federal filings, state portals, and utility PDFs, all in different formats. Sisense gave us the ability to unify and deliver it through a single platform for our clients to explore.

—Akshay Deshmukh, Data Analyst, Bluefield Research

Introducing Bluefield Research

Bluefield Research is a water market intelligence firm serving engineering companies, utilities, infrastructure providers, and investors. Based in Boston with a global presence, Bluefield delivers forecasts, project data, utility investment insights, and M&A tracking to support strategic decisions across the water industry.

The team combines proprietary research with advanced analytics to turn complex infrastructure data into competitive advantage.

The goal: Turn complexity into clarity

Bluefield was ingesting massive volumes of water data spread across 50 state portals, federal sites, utility budget PDFs, and third-party sources. With no shared standards for system names or identifiers, joining these datasets was a manual and error-prone process.

We’re looking at over 49,000 drinking water utilities, 19,000 wastewater systems, and thousands of projects, M&A deals, and budgets. But IDs and names didn’t match across datasets. That made it hard to see the big picture and deliver value to our clients.

—Akshay Deshmukh, Data Analyst, Bluefield Research

The team needed a way to standardize and clean incoming data, automate preparation tasks, and make analysis easier for both internal users and clients.

Why Bluefield partnered with Sisense: Powering the Utility Hub with Sisense Intelligence

Bluefield evaluated several platforms, including Tableau and Qlik, but ultimately chose Sisense for its flexible architecture and strong support model. One of the most important differentiators was the integrated suite of AI-powered features called Sisense Intelligence. This suite aligned with Bluefield’s goal of scaling insight delivery without building an in-house analytics team.

Using Sisense and Sisense Intelligence, Bluefield launched the Utility Hub: A centralized analytics experience that connects more than 1.2 million water infrastructure data points across 15 sources. This included:

• Cleaned and standardized system names and IDs
• Deduplication and structured drill-down paths
• Dashboards customized for different users and use cases

The Utility Hub is fully white-labeled to match Bluefield’s brand and is now used by more than 70 Bluefield clients and 177 internal users.

Sisense helped us focus on our business case instead of the backend of how we present our data. That’s been key to scaling our value.

—Akshay Deshmukh, Data Analyst, Bluefield Research

Delivering smarter insights with AI

Bluefield plans to use multiple components of Sisense Intelligence to enhance how clients and internal teams interact with data. Bluefield’s clients will use these tools to explore data, identify opportunities, and create custom dashboards independently, without needing technical training.

Natural language exploration with assistant

The Sisense Intelligence assistant allows users to ask questions and generate visualizations using plain English. For example, a client looking to expand into California with several granular questions about the market landscape can get them answered instantly. Bluefield clients may want to filter and extract a list of medium-sized private utilities, complete with system IDs and contact information. With assistant, that’s easily done.

With Sisense assistant, our non-technical users can finally interact with complex data the same way they’d talk to a colleague. They can ask questions the way they’d normally speak and get answers right away, complete with visualization and context, provided by the ‘narrative’ feature. What used to take hours of filtering and building widgets now happens in seconds.

—Akshay Deshmukh, Data Analyst, Bluefield Research

Narrative gives users context

After the assistant returns visual charts, narrative, another feature in the Sisense Intelligence suite, provides context that explains what the data reveals. This helps business users understand key drivers and trends without needing technical support.

The narrative feature will be a game-changer for us because it gives users a text summary about the chart, in plain language. The AI automatically writes the story about each chart, surfacing insights like market saturation or emerging trends that a user may have missed. It helps all users, technical or not, understand what the data is saying.

—Akshay Deshmukh, Data Analyst, Bluefield Research

Smarter water data, intelligently delivered

Bluefield Research has shown what’s possible when fragmented data is paired with a flexible, AI-powered analytics platform. With Sisense Intelligence, the company has transformed how teams and clients explore, understand, and act on market insights.

The result is a smarter, more scalable analytics experience that grows with the business. For teams managing complex data at scale, Sisense provides a proven way to deliver faster, clearer insights.

Why Bluefield chose to buy, not build in-house

Bluefield intentionally chose not to build an analytics stack internally. Instead, the team invested in a platform that offered powerful features out-of-the-box along with deep customization. This approach saved engineering resources and allowed for faster time to market.

We rely on the Sisense team. We didn’t want to build in-house. Having strong support and a platform we can trust has been key to our success.

—Steph Aldock, Senior Marketing Director, Bluefield Research

Sisense handles maintenance, upgrades, and platform security. As a result, Bluefield can stay focused on delivering value to clients. With Sisense Intelligence, the company didn’t just embed analytics. It made insights easier to access, quicker to generate, and more useful for every type of user.

Looking ahead: Scaling AI and UX

With Sisense Intelligence in place, Bluefield is expanding how it delivers value through data. Upcoming priorities include:

• Leveraging more AI-driven modeling and automation
• Improving the user interface to give clients more flexibility in navigating the platform
• Consolidating forecasting capabilities
• Launching new interactive features ahead of their first data summit

What began as a project to unify fragmented data has become an intelligent, scalable system that supports both exploration and strategic planning.

Ready to experience a smarter way to build analytics? Try out the full functionality of the Sisense platform, including the AI assistant you just read about, with our free 7-day trial.