Artificial Intelligence in business intelligence has been top of mind for quite some time. It’s prominently featured in automated AI enabled chips, and it’s clear that AI will play a big part in the future of business intelligence. For example, some of the recently developed AI capabilities seem to come straight out of a science fiction movie: voice recognition and digital assistants, task automation, medical diagnoses, and facial recognition systems and systems to fight those facial recognition systems.
Not only is AI capable of doing all those fantastic science-fiction things, but it’s also capable of making a big difference in our analytics world. Artificial intelligence in business intelligence helps democratize data and improve analytics adoption. Radical advances in computing power, predictive analytics, machine learning, and AI have opened the door to a new generation of BI tools. If implemented properly, AI pulls actionable insights from complex data sets and automatically recommending next actions. AI provides data points exactly where and when they are needed most with very little work required by the user.
AI enables you to put your data to work
By analyzing all the data that’s been collected and delivering real time recommendations, AI enables you to actually use your data to your competitive advantage. If your competitors aren’t using AI, they’ll be stuck sifting through mountains of data on their own. By using AI, you’ll be able to harness the power of the data you collect, identify more trends, build recommended actions based on those trends, and ensure that those actions and surrounding context are delivered to your end users exactly when and where they need them.
While AI, like any technology, certainly has some limitations most notably when it comes to cyber security or inherent bias—the potential benefits are enormous. In spite of this, many companies are lagging behind when it comes to recognizing AI as a trend in the future of business analytics and intelligence. Those companies that begin to implement AI will soon find themselves outperforming their competitors when it comes to improved overall business performance and higher revenue.
AI works by combining large amounts of data with fast, iterative processing and intelligent algorithms, allowing the software to learn automatically from patterns or features in the data. Cognitive computing is a subfield of AI that strives for a natural, human-like interaction with machines.
AI bridges the gap for business users who don’t have deep technical knowledge
AI can analyze massive quantities of data and deliver recommendations based on that data, it makes analytics and big data insights accessible and understandable to the average user not just data scientists. Where a sharp divide once existed between two groups of users those familiar enough with data science to glean value from the data themselves, and those who are not AI bridges that gap and delivers insights in a digestible format.
AI is already getting better at identifying trends and extracting insights from complex data than humans are, and these abilities will only improve over time. Rather than continuing to pour money into tools that require employees to spend their time manually analyzing data and making mundane decisions, business organizations should invest in the future of BI and AI powered systems that automate the bulk of these processes and allow their talent to focus on the strategic problems that really move the needle.
