Caveats for the dashboards brief: pervasive BI/embedded-analytics vendor sourcing; the viral "60-70%" stat is folklore; SMB data thin; retention claims unproven

The honest summary of source quality across this brief:

• Source-incentive flag (pervasive). A large share of available material is published by BI and embedded-analytics vendors (Microsoft, Salesforce/Tableau, Google, Metabase, Luzmo, Explo, Cube, Holistics, Toucan, Sisense, Reveal, Logi Analytics) — direct incentive to overstate dashboard value, adoption, and retention impact.
• The flagship abandonment statistic is folklore — CORRECTION: the viral "60-70% (or 60-80%) of dashboards go unused (Gartner)" stat cannot be traced to any named Gartner report — vendor folklore has no verifiable primary source. Use BARC (~25%, BARC / Eckerson Group (March 2022, 214 D&A leaders surveyed Nov-Dec 2021) — BI/analytics adoption at 25% of employees on average; "stuck around 20% for many years" per Eckerson) and Gartner (~30%, Gartner — "pervasive business intelligence remains elusive, with BI and analytics adoption at about 30% of all employees" (doc 3753469, Howson & Sallam)) adoption figures instead.
• The Luzmo 72% / 58% / 3.6-out-of-5 numbers ("72% of users regularly abandon dashboards for spreadsheets" — Luzmo vendor-run State of Dashboards 2025 survey of ~200 SaaS/product leaders; "Dashboards: Dead, Dying or Evolving?") are vendor-run survey research, not independent.
• The Logi Analytics 45% figure ("Only 45% of people with access to BI tools actually use them" — traces to Logi Analytics (BI vendor) report, not independent research) is vendor-sourced.
• Pricing volatility: all vendor pricing shifts frequently and varies by region, contract, and bundling. Every figure here is date-stamped (~2026) and should be re-verified.
• SMB-specific data is thin. Much adoption research covers enterprises; Software Advice (online survey of 243 US business owners/managers) — 5% of SMBs report using a BI dashboard to analyze data; Excel/Google Sheets dominate at 65% is single-source (n=243) and directional.
• Build-vs-buy TCO numbers (Custom-embedded 3-year TCO converges on $300K-$630K (multiple, mostly vendor sources) with 20-30% annual maintenance; hidden costs are multi-tenancy/RLS, performance at scale, perpetual maintenance) are vendor-modeled, not audited, and skew toward "buy."
• Retention/churn-improvement figures ("31% retention increase," "27% churn drop") are vendor-sourced and should be treated as marketing, not evidence.

Cross-brief: This is the dashboard sibling of Caveats for the customer-facing-calculators brief: every conversion-lift figure is unproven; nearly all are vendor-self-reported, Caveats for the data-driven-tools brief: vendor self-reporting on conversion; enterprise-scale benchmarks; named-user quotes; macro projections, and Caveats for the client-portals brief: source-incentives are pervasive; the independent anchors are McKinsey and Gartner; market-size figures unreliable; the viral 42% stat is misattributed. Same posture, same source-incentive asymmetry across all four briefs.