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Presumably some ad engineers got sick of producing arbitrary customer reports, took the corpus of all customer requests, and tied it to the sheets that generated those reports. And a ton of glue code to make it all work.

I wonder if it's actually machine learning or if they just implemented a query language that tries to guess what you mean.

The definition of machine learning that I use is: an algorithm which improves its performance through experience.

So, if charts doesn't get better the more you use it, it's not machine learning.

If I had to guess I'd say the machine learning part is analyzing a sentence ("Show me a line graph for x, y, and z") and determining what exactly they want to see.

Seems similar to what Wolfram Alpha does, but restricted to a smaller data set.