Ask Kimo

Ask questions in plain English and get charts backed by certified measures. How Ask Kimo works, writing good questions, reviewing answers and controlling what it can see.

Updated Oct 7, 20266 min readEdit on GitHub

Ask Kimo turns a question into a chart. It does not write free-form SQL against your raw tables: it maps your words to measures, dimensions and filters in your published models, then lets the semantic layer generate the query. That is why its answers match your dashboards. Try it in the live demo.

How it works

1
Understand
Kimo parses the question, resolves synonyms ("ARR", "signups") and relative dates ("last quarter", "since launch").
2
Plan
It picks measures, dimensions and filters from models you are allowed to see, and a chart type that fits the shape of the result.
3
Query
The semantic layer compiles the plan to SQL and runs it with your permissions and row-level policies.
4
Explain
The answer shows the chart, a one-sentence summary, and an Explain panel with the plan and the generated SQL.

Writing good questions

Instead of	Try
"How are we doing?"	"MRR vs last month by plan"
"Traffic"	"Organic clicks per week since January, by country"
"Bad customers"	"Customers with more than 3 failed payments in 90 days"
"Ships"	"Vessels with AIS gaps over 6 hours in zone North-4 this week"

Reviewing an answer

Every answer lists the measures it used with their certification status. If Ask Kimo had to guess (an ambiguous dimension, a measure without a description), it says so and offers alternatives. Editors can turn a corrected answer into a verified question; similar questions will reuse it.

1curl https://api.getkimo.com/v1/ask \2  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KIMO_TOKEN" \3  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \4  -d '{ "question": "MRR by plan, last 6 months", "space": "finance" }'

Privacy and control

Ask Kimo only sees model metadata (names, descriptions, types) and the results of queries you run. Raw rows are never used for training.
Admins can exclude models or columns (for example email) from Ask Kimo entirely.
On Enterprise and on-premise deployments, Ask Kimo can run on a self-hosted model with no external calls.

Verified questions

Verified questions are how a team teaches Ask Kimo its own dialect. When an editor marks an answer as verified, Kimo stores the question, the plan and the chart. Future questions that mean the same thing ("revenue last quarter by segment", "Q3 sales per segment") reuse the verified plan instead of planning from scratch, and the answer shows a Verified by badge with the editor’s name. Admins can review all verified questions under Settings → Ask Kimo, and unverify any that drift as models change.

Signal	What it means
Certified	Every measure used is certified.
Verified	An editor approved this exact plan.
Guess	Kimo picked between ambiguous options; check the alternatives.