Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents

Data visualizations are the bridge between user and data.

But building AI agents that can generate visualizations reliably can be very tricky:

- simple chart specs can be reliable, but generated charts are often of low quality due to reliance on system defaults; - complex chart specs with explicit details can produce good-looking charts, but they are verbose and agents can struggle with reliability

We figured out it is a limitation on the language issue (not just AI capability thing) -- current visualization languages are a bit too low-level for AI agents, requiring them to explicitly make visual decisions that are supposed to be handled by a good compiler. Flint is a visualization intermediate language to address this issue, allow AI agents to solve this last-mile human-agent interaction problem. It provides a simple semantic-type based specification, and contains a layout optimization engine that can produce good-looking charts (filled with derived low-level details) from simple high-level specs. The result is also very human understandable and adaptable. Flint powers data formulator for generating visualizations (another open source project from microsoft https://data-formulator.ai/).

Flint is available open source, and we built a MCP server that you can directly plug flint in your favorite agent app to play with data.