How Visa went from multi-day reporting to conversational analytics agents with ClickHouse Cloud and LibreChat

Summary

Visa used ClickHouse Cloud to modernize reporting on Authorize.net payments data, replacing multi-day analyst-led turnaround with natural-language queries for internal teams. The solution pairs LibreChat, an open-source conversational interface, with the ClickHouse MCP server and runs on ClickHouse Cloud on AWS, allowing agents to explore and query a roughly 40 PB data footprint containing millions of rows. ClickHouse materialized views pre-compute and incrementally update results, reducing scanned data and bringing example analyses down to 100–200 milliseconds, with reported speedups of roughly 30–70 times. The platform also uses encrypted transfers, Amazon S3, VPC PrivateLink, change data capture, and federated access controls, while Visa reports identifying millions of dollars in revenue risk and reclaiming 8–10 hours per user each week.

Takeaways

1. 1

   ClickHouse materialized views reduced a revenue analysis from scanning 500,000 rows in 2–3 seconds to reading 624 rows in 100 milliseconds, reported as roughly 50 times faster.

2. 2

   LibreChat and the ClickHouse MCP server let internal users ask questions such as revenue risk by merchant segment without writing SQL or manually handling joins and denormalization.

3. 3

   Visa reports reclaiming 8–10 hours per user each week and collectively saving thousands of hours per month through self-service dashboards, lookups, and report preparation.