Business intelligence turns company data into dashboards, management reports and analyses that staff can explore themselves. Organisations use it for financial and operational steering, and increasingly as embedded analytics inside their own products. Power BI and Tableau are the well-known non-European reference points.
The risk lies less in the data itself than in what accumulates around it. A BI tool stores connection credentials for your source systems, often as a broad read account, and keeps cached copies or extracts of the data. Your business logic also lives in the tool: calculated fields, metrics and data models in a proprietary format. Anyone who wants to switch rebuilds the dashboards. The Data Act requires cloud service providers to offer open interfaces and export in commonly used machine-readable formats, but that does not automatically cover a dashboard definition.
When choosing a European option, look for a semantic layer you can manage separately from the visualisation, connection through standard SQL, row- and column-level access rules that still apply when dashboards are embedded, and whether extracts and caches stay in your own region. Ask how dashboards and metrics can be exported, and whether a self-hosted installation offers the same features.