We’re excited to announce a major update to Ask Your Data, our conversational analytics tool within Intelligent Insights. Ask Your Data now automatically scopes insights to the sub‑account level, enabling sub-account admins within an institution to access and act on the data that matters most to them – without needing to go through the root account.
What’s Changing
Until now, Ask Your Data only surfaced institution‑wide insights, making it primarily useful at the root-account level, for root-account admins. With this update, the experience becomes more context-aware – when used in a sub-account, Ask Your Data automatically restricts results to that sub‑account and its descendant sub‑accounts. The familiar interface remains unchanged – ask questions in plain language and receive immediate, data‑backed answers – but the scope of insights is now precisely tailored to the context of where the user is in the account structure. This enhancement also empowers sub‑account admins to take advantage of the tool, and make informed, targeted decisions based solely on the data most relevant to their areas of responsibility.
Why We’re Making This Change
Institutions often operate through a network of sub-accounts that reflect the real-world structure of schools, programs, or campuses. These decentralized units need visibility into their own performance and engagement patterns, yet until now, those insights often depended on support from centralized data teams or root-level administrators. With this new context-aware data scoping enhancement, Ask Your Data becomes available at the sub-account level – helping local teams get direct access to the insights they need, when they need them. This change reflects our belief that every level of the institution should be empowered to make data-informed decisions quickly and independently.
How This Helps
This update unlocks a new layer of flexibility and autonomy for administrators. We want every admin – at every level of your organization – to have the tools they need to ask questions, explore trends, and take action based on insights. Now, with scoped data access in sub-accounts, admins can work more independently and make faster decisions that are tailored to their specific programs, faculty, and students. It’s the same powerful Ask Your Data experience – just with the right data in the right hands.
What to Expect
If your institution already uses Ask Your Data, you can now enable it for sub‑accounts – though access is not automatic. Just like at the root level, permissions must be granted to sub-account administrators within the sub-account’s Permissions page. Once those permissions are in place, admins can start using Ask Your Data with the same intuitive interface and natural language capabilities they’ve seen at the root level.
When used in a sub-account, Ask Your Data automatically scopes results to that sub-account and its descendant sub-accounts, ensuring that admins see only the data relevant to their areas of responsibility.
However, there are a few exceptions. To avoid overly restricting or distorting results, the following datasets remain visible at all levels:
- enrollment_terms
- grading_periods
Grading_period_groups
These tables typically apply across multiple sub-accounts or represent institution-wide settings. Scoping them could result in incomplete answers or confusion. We’ll continue monitoring these exceptions and may adjust them over time based on user feedback and evolving needs.
This update is a key step toward making our Insights tools more flexible, secure, and inclusive across all levels of Canvas administration. We're excited to see how sub-account teams put Ask Your Data to work in their own contexts, and we welcome your feedback as we continue to evolve Intelligent Insights.
