When one size won’t fit all: Can AI get the right data to the right people at the right time?

Your Analytics Consumers will drive Your AI needs

If most business leaders are like the rest of us, they see the potential of “AI and Data Science” but they may think ‘that doesn’t apply to me, we’re not sophisticated enough to implement something like that’ or ‘I’d love it if I worked for a company like that, but where would I even begin to bring something like that to my company?’ Getting the right information and tools to everyone is the challenge.

How do we do that? We have to consider who are our consumers of BI and analytics. How do they use data? And what will they get from an AI enhanced experience? We’ve observed three personas who will benefit from enhanced Data Science and Machine Learning (DSML) tools in their BI solution:

The Power User: This user is closest to their data. They know their business and their teams. They know the success criteria for a given operation & know exactly what questions to ask of their data. However, with traditional BI tools, they don’t have the skills or required technical knowledge to build their own advanced analytics and quickly answer new and emerging questions. DSML gives them the tools to quickly develop algorithms, bring in new data and explain the results. With DSML, they can train models, explain the predictions, and do what-if analysis.

The Casual User: “The person on the ground.” This user interacts with the customer, warehouse inventory, credit card & loan applications, or business partner on a daily basis. While not technically sophisticated, they use embedded dashboards to augment their decisions, communicate an update to a customer, or share a projection with a business partner. By volume, this employee represents 90-95% of BI usage.  AI assisted analytics will help this user find information easily with features like Natural Language Query that lets them find information using their own terms and without rebuilding queries or dashboards.

The Business Executive: This is the leader who runs their meetings off of a dashboard and wants a consistent, accurate picture of growth, efficiency, and risk.  They need information on the fly to check their operational dashboards, look at new orders, and track the fulfillment of existing orders, etc. They need an easily digestible, holistic view of their operations to make higher-quality decisions and adjustments to strategy.  AI features will let this user make specific queries of multiple data sources to generate insights and will provide explainability to support the data.

Once you have identified your users, you can build a strategy for maximizing the AI and DSML tools in your Business Analytics software.  At ibi, we have been evolving WebFOCUS to leverage the power of AI for all our users. Understanding the need for deeper, faster insights and accessibility to data, we have added DSML, Natural Language Query and other tools. With WebFOCUS, you can bring the data to the people that use it and provide them with no code tools that let them drive data insights.

Interested in how it works? Watch this video