Business intelligence (BI) utilizes tools and technology to create systems and solutions that streamline the collection, processing, and analysis of big data and sharpen business operations through more informed decision-making. Injecting BI data analysis processes with the power of sophisticated Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and machine learning dramatically enhances traditional BI’s potential. With modern AI-powered BI, organizations gain elevated insights into customer behaviors and identify previously undiscovered patterns and trends, resulting in a significant competitive advantage.
Business intelligence evolution
Over the years, BI has evolved from a descriptive (raw data summary for human interpretation) technology to predictive (providing future insights based on probabilities) to a prescriptive (AI-powered analytics that both predicts and prescribes optimal outcomes) solution. The image below depicts the historical evolution of business intelligence.
Source IBM
With data source landscapes expanding to include IoT devices, smartphones, tablets, and many more, organizations are presented with vast opportunities for identifying, capturing, and synthesizing actionable intelligence from operational and customer data in real-time, gaining fresh new expansive insights.
Advantage AI
Organizations of all sizes now leverage AI and machine learning to improve operational efficiency and deliver tailored customer experiences, services, and products.
– AI is powering modern decision-making and rapidly transforming various industries such as healthcare, BFSI, retail, and life sciences.
– AI’s automation and augmentation capabilities enable it to provide prescriptive analytics and offer better insights than ever before.
– AI is heading and steadily making progress toward modeling human intelligence to learn and make rational, informed decisions.
Source IBM
Need for AI-powered business intelligence
By integrating AI into BI tools, organizations can quickly view and understand the connections between complex data structures. Though traditional BI tools are self-sufficient in obtaining valuable insights, they fall short when data is generated rapidly, in large volumes, and from multiple sources. Further, BI tools are human-dependent when it comes to the feeding of and analysis of data. These dependencies can interject human bias and human error and run the risk of not efficiently nor optimally leveraging the data. This void is filled when AI solutions are introduced providing a significant advantage.
BI functionality
AI expands and enhances the functionality of BI applications. Legacy BI tools can process and visualize big data but fail to predict trends or generate real-time insights. When integrated with AI and machine learning, these tools gain these insights, thereby bringing more value to an organization.
Closing the gap
AI facilitates BI integration with the latest technologies like predictive analytics, machine learning, and NLP, closing the gap between visual representation and actionable insights. AI helps the machine better understand human language.
Automation
Data preparation is time-consuming. AI can automate the data preparation process by scanning through various databases to retrieve desired datasets and merge them into a single view for BI consumption.
Conversational analytics
BI tools integrated with AI and NLP support conversational analytics. The users or the data analysts can extract data via voice queries or create custom datasets and feed them into the BI tools for analysis.
Reduce human errors
AI has self-learning capabilities that enable it to eliminate human error and improve data quality and insights. AI models detect error patterns and prevent future failures in analytics. AI also helps in visualizing connections within and across complex datasets.
Democratize the data
AI democratizes data by enabling users to quickly and directly obtain actionable insights. It helps users and data analysts create a two-way conversation with their data. AI-powered BI tools can target specific BI tasks such as visualization recommendations, “what if” scenarios, and forecasting.
Gain advantage
BI acts as a bridge between the data analysts and the data that drives decisive actions. The ability to make data-driven business decisions is key to sustainable success. Though AI has been slowly introduced into some legacy BI tools to improve analytical capabilities and increase accessibility for non-technical users, many of these tools are yet to embrace the power of AI. Characteristic of these slow adopters are challenges addressing data complexities such as accuracy, relevancy, validation, performance, and scalability.
A more aggressive movement to business intelligence powered by AI and machine learning will help overcome the challenges associated with legacy BI. Injecting business intelligence with sophisticated AI algorithms transforms BI analytics providing elevated insights into behaviors and previously undiscovered patterns and trends that can result in significant competitive advantage.
If you would like to learn more about the value that AI and machine learning would bring to your business intelligence processes, send us your query to intellect2@intellect2.ai. Intellect Data, Inc. is a software solutions company incorporating data science and artificial intelligence into modern digital products with Intellect2TM. IntellectDataTM develops and implements software, software components, and software as a service (SaaS) for enterprise, desktop, web, mobile, cloud, IoT, wearables, and AR/VR environments. Locate us on the web at www.intellect2.ai.