How an autonomous vehicle company moved safety review from a BI tool to Retool.

A safety manager sees an intervention in the weekly numbers: a human driver took control of an autonomous vehicle mid-run. To watch it, they click a link in the BI dashboard, and the footage opens on a separate page. They watch it, go back, and find their place in the table again. Then they do it for the next event.

The client is an autonomous vehicle company. Its operational safety managers review safety-critical interventions across the fleet, and they are not engineers.

Before: a dashboard built for a wider audience

The team tracked interventions in the company's BI tool. It surfaced counts and filters for audiences across the company. For the safety managers, it had two gaps that grew as their reviews became more specific.

The first was density. The dashboard carried far more than the safety managers needed to act on. Finding their signal meant working past metrics meant for other audiences.

The second was footage. The BI tool had no in-app playback, so every event review broke in two. For a team whose job is to understand what happened in one specific moment, that break was the main cost of every review.

What we found one level down

The request was a better dashboard. The underlying need was continuity: one screen that runs from the fleet-wide picture to the footage of a single run, with nothing in between.

That set two design rules. Every data point that a safety manager does not act on comes out. And the footage plays inside the review, at the moment of the event, not on another page.

Because the users are non-technical, there was a third rule. The tool had to be usable without training.

What we built

A two-tab Retool dashboard, now in production.

Overview

The Overview tab shows the aggregate safety picture for a chosen period:

• Intervention counts, and the safety rate relative to distance driven.

• Breakdowns by region, vehicle platform, driving environment, and time of day.

• A trend chart of how the count moves across the selected window.

• A per-model table, so managers can compare how each driving model performs in operation.

Filters for time period, platform, region, and country scope the view to whatever the review needs.

Interventions

The Interventions tab is where individual events get reviewed. Each row in the log is one safety-critical intervention, with the metadata needed to identify it. Expanding a row plays the footage from that run inside the dashboard, starting at the timestamp of the event.

The player uses Retool's native iframe component, configured to allow playback from the footage source. No custom component was needed. Because it opens at the event's timestamp, managers land on the moment in question rather than the start of the run.

What changed

The BI tool is no longer part of this workflow. The safety team reviews interventions in the Retool dashboard, from the fleet totals down to the footage, in one screen.

The Overview shows only the metrics the safety managers act on. The per-model table gives them the comparison they asked for. Footage is one click from any row in the log, and the review keeps its place while it plays.

The pattern carries beyond vehicles. Any team that moves from a summary of events to footage of one event can use the same two tabs: quality control with inspection video, logistics incident review, or security operations with recordings. Retool holds the data and the access rules, and the embedded player handles the media.

For another build where the people at the desk shaped the tool, see how a global enterprise automated customer support with AI.