Agentic data analytics promises better and more accurate findings in less time and effort, but even if we accept these promises at face value, surely they cannot come for free? In this talk, I will examine the emerging trend of agentic AI for sensemaking with an eye not only for its benefits, but also for its costs. When an LLM coding agent builds an interactive dashboard for me, what of my control over the analytical decisions? When an automated design assistant picks the best chart for me, what of my own aesthetic and personal taste? When a conversational agent prompts me for my reactions, what of my own initiative? To answer these questions and more, I will present several design probes where my collaborators and I explore mechanisms for agent-based visualization and analysis. I will close with ideas for measuring phenomena such as delegation, fluid agency, and skill atrophy, and with a framework for modeling and designing human-centered AI tools for data analysis.
Niklas Elmqvist (he/him/his) is a Villum Investigator, a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, and a full professor in the Department of Computer Science at Aarhus University in Aarhus, Denmark. He received his Ph.D. in computer science in 2006 from Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden. Prior to joining Aarhus, he was faculty at University of Maryland in College Park, MD, USA from 2014 to 2023, and at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN, USA from 2008 to 2014. From 2016 to 2021, he served as the director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL) at University of Maryland. His research area is data visualization, human-computer interaction, and human-centered AI. He is the recipient of Villum Investigator and NSF CAREER grants as well as best paper and honorable mention awards from the IEEE Information Visualization conference, the ACM CHI conference, and the ACM DIS conference. He was papers chair for IEEE InfoVis 2016, 2017, and 2020, subcommittee chair for ACM CHI 2020 and 2021, papers chair for IEEE PacificVis 2024, and overall papers chair for IEEE VIS in 2024 and 2025. He is also an associate editor for the Information Visualization journal and the Journal for Visualization and Interaction. In addition, he serves as series editor of the Springer Nature Synthesis Lectures on Visualization. Finally, he was a community-elected member of the IEEE VIS Steering Committee from 2023 to 2026. His research has been funded by both federal agencies such as NSF, NIH, and DHS as well as by companies such as Google, NVIDIA, and Microsoft. He is the recipient of the IEEE VGTC Visualization Technical Achievement Award (2025), the Purdue Student Government Graduate Mentoring Award (2014), the Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Teacher Award (2012), and the Purdue ECE Chicago Alumni New Faculty award (2010). He has been a member of the IEEE VGTC Visualization Academy since 2024 and the ACM SIGCHI Academy since 2026. He is a member of ELLIS, the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems. He was elevated to ACM Fellow in 2025 and IEEE Fellow in 2024.