I would say SQL still is that! My wife had to learn some SQL to pull reports in some non-tech finance job 10 years ago. (I think she still believes this is what I do all day…)

I suppose this could be useful in that it prevents everyone in the company having to learn even the basics of SQL which is some barrier, however minimal.

Also the LLM will presumably be able to see all the tables/fields and ‘understand’ them (with the big assumption that they are even remotely reasonably named) so English language queries will be much more feasible now. Basically what LLMs have over all those older attempts is REALLY good fuzziness.

I see this being useful for some subset of questions.