Kong

The challenge: Meeting the pressure to scale data-driven decisions

As Kong grew, the demand for insights exploded faster than the data team could deliver. Ad hoc questions flooded from marketing, sales, and product teams, pulling the analytics team away from strategic work.

The team faced three critical gaps:

• Leaders lacked clear visibility into business performance metrics

• There was no standardized approach to product analytics across business units

• The go-to-market team did not have forecasting capabilities for customer renewal conversations.

Kong risked becoming bottlenecked by their hypergrowth. The Kong data team needed a platform that could democratize insights while maintaining quality and governance.

The solution: AI-analytics democratize insights across Kong

Automated insights increased Kong's leadership data visibility to 92%

Kong's data transformation started with Hex becoming their primary analytics platform for product insights with Snowflake as their data warehouse. Within a year, executive reliance on data skyrocketed from 1 out of 30 slides in quarterly reviews to 23 out of 25 (92%).

With more visibility, the data team needed help with a higher influx of ad hoc questions. Snehal Karanjkar, Kong’s Data Science Leader, turned on Hex Threads and the Hex Bot Slack integration to let their team members answer their own questions. This helped them reduce basic requests, so that the data team could focus on higher-value, strategic work.

Hex’s Context Studio revealed that multiple team members were using Threads and the Bot Slack integration to get trusted answers independently, including people that Snehal didn't realize had needed it. Teams across the company, like product, pricing and packaging, go-to-market, and design were all self-serving.

"I love Hex's Context Studio. I didn’t know how many people were using Threads or what questions they were asking, now I'm able to proactively manage how people use our data." - Snehal Karanjkar, Data Science Leader

Kong’s product performance command center saved 240 hours/year in manual analysis

To stay on top of ARR growth, Kong's leadership team needed to see business health across the funnel. The data team built a dynamic data app where each tab highlighted health metrics for a different stage of the acquisition-to-retention journey. Explanatory text boxes guided stakeholders through the insights, clarifying what the data showed (see the embedded app below).

Insights from Kong's Business Summary app directly drove ARR growth and helped stakeholders self-serve routine questions. By tracking average selling price (ASP) by segment, leadership identified a high-spend customer tier and prioritized product enhancements for that group — ultimately increasing ARR.

This template approach saved approximately 240 hours per year in manual analyses and ensured consistent reporting across all product lines.

"Hex's tab management feature lets us organize insights into dedicated views for each product lifecycle stage — acquisition, activation, conversion, and retention — enabling a granular view of user behavior and KPIs at each stage without overcrowding the dashboard." - Snehal Karanjkar, Data Science Leader

More confident renewal conversations from a forecasting model built in 30 minutes

Contract renewals at Kong used to rely on guesswork and back-of-the-napkin math. Hex’s Notebook Agent evolved the team's entire forecasting approach.

One business partner analyst used it to build an exponential smoothing model in 30 minutes, transforming how Kong predicted customer utilization. Hex’s agent helped identify the right model and generate production-ready dashboards, changing renewal conversations from just estimates to confident data-driven projections spanning up to 36 months.

"We went from back-of-the-napkin math to 36-month utilization forecasts in 30 minutes. The Notebook Agent made that possible." - Snehal Karanjkar, Data Science Leader

The impact: Increasing ARR with more data-driven decisions

Kong's transformation with Hex demonstrates what happens when AI meets thoughtful analytics infrastructure:

• Executive reviews became 92% data-driven: Quarterly product reviews now feature data in 23 out of 25 slides, up from just 1 out of 30

• 30%+ reduction in ad hoc questions: More people are self-serving their answers with the Notebook Agent and Threads, reducing the bottleneck of the analytics team, with further usage anticipated

• 30-minute model development: Forecasting models that previously required weeks of specialized data science work are now built in a single afternoon

• 240 hours saved annually: Standardized product dashboard templates eliminates manual reporting work

• Team capability expansion: Sophisticated, trusted analyses are being built by non-technical team members who don’t have Python expertise

"Hex's AI capabilities have made my team more efficient and enabled our non-technical teams to access insights across the business." - Snehal Karanjkar, Data Science Leader

Kong plans to continue building semantic layers in Hex to scale and unlock insights for the broader organization.