Improve Data-driven Decisions with AI in Business Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has now reached the boardrooms of organizations, redefining the way decisions are being made. Business Intelligence (BI) gives decision makers clear visibility into business situations. AI enhances the BI insights to make them more actionable, focused, and contextual. Let’s understand how AI augments BI and helps decision makers make better decisions.

How AI Elevates BI over Traditional BI Limitations

AI has found multiple applications across diverse areas like content generation (text, images, video, music, and animation), text summarization, translations, and code generation. It has brought automation, speed, and accuracy to many processes, including business intelligence. AI elevates BI in such a way that anyone can use it to gain actionable insights instantly, without any special training or efforts.

AI-powered BI is an umbrella term covering multiple technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), generative AI and so on, that automate, expedite, and enhance processes that were done manually earlier. Here’s how AI has contributed in augmenting BI and eliminating the limitations of traditional BI.

Inclusion of all users

Traditional BI is mainly IT-led and used mostly by data scientists to query data, extract insights, and create reports that answer the questions submitted by business users.

AI-powered BI brings self-service capabilities for business users to explore data themselves, consume insights in a more understandable manner, and create their own dashboards – without any technical skills. It learns from past interactions and personalizes insights based on the interests and work areas of users. This way, AI-powered BI democratizes data and insights across all users.

Depth of insights

Traditional BI usually functions on the “What you ask is what you get” approach. Users need to know what they’re looking for when they browse through predefined dashboards or reports for answers.

AI-powered BI not only answers "what" happened, but also "why" business metrics changed, and "how" to make data-driven decisions. With AI-powered BI, insights can be automated such that users receive them as they happen in business, without having to explicitly search for them.

Speed and quality of insights

Traditional BI depends on predefined reports, static dashboards, time-consuming information request process, and dependency on analysts. All these factors result in delays in receiving insights and affect the quality of decisions.

AI-powered BI has the ability to process huge amounts of real-time data, thus ensuring the currency of insights. By making insights available at the point of decision-making, AI-powered BI reduces the time-to-insights and helps users take quick actions. With its advanced analysis capabilities, AI can surfacing hidden patterns and trends that are not discoverable by manual analysis.

Uses of AI in Business Intelligence

AI can help increase efficiency, accuracy, and speed of BI processes used for generating insights.

Data Preparation and Refinement

AI-powered BI can automate time-consuming processes of cleaning and organizing structured data. This helps cut down data processing time, ensures accuracy, and frees up data engineers to focus on more complex tasks.

Predictive Analytics and Root Cause Analysis

AI-powered BI can run detailed analysis within seconds to identify patterns, flag anomalies, spot trends, and make predictions. Thanks to AI-powered BI, users can go beyond the “what” to find out “why” business changes happened. This helps them understand the root cause and identify key influencing factors. Using a single search, users can examine all dimensions related to the question and drill deep effortlessly.

Automated and Personalized Recommendations

With AI-powered BI, business users can get personalized insights that are relevant for their role or work area. AI learns from a user’s past queries and topics of interest to offer search suggestions and business headlines in an automated way. This way, users can reach insights faster.

Better Delivery of Insights

AI-powered BI can create instant summaries in natural language, detailed reports, and engaging visualizations automatically to deliver insights in a clear, concise, and easily understandable manner.

Real-Time Insights

With huge amounts of data coming in every minute, it is almost impossible to analyze it all at once. AI-powered BI has the capacity to perform real-time analysis and generate real-time insights that would otherwise be missed or delayed by human analysts.

Accuracy of Analysis

Manual analysis can be influenced by biases, errors, and limited knowledge. Incorrect insights can lead to incorrect decisions. However, AI-powered BI can circumvent such influences to explore and analyze data better. It can spot inconsistencies in data, minimize errors, and improve the quality of insights.

Future of AI-Powered BI in Decision-Making

Gartner predicts that by 2030, AI will eliminate 80% of today’s manual project management tasks. By automating iterative tasks, augmenting processes, and improving quality, AI can help teams focus on core activities, invest their efforts in innovation, and give more time to high-priority tasks.

There are different types of decisions – simple and complex, routine and risky, high-priority and low priority. All of these cannot be handled in the same way. Some require a comprehensive understanding, some require quick actions, while some require coordination with multiple stakeholders. AI can play various roles in managing these decisions. For example:

AI can automate simple decisions that require quick response, scalability, and consistency.

AI can augment complex processes that require rapid analysis of huge volumes of data and advanced calculations and predictions.

AI can provide decision support for decisions that require human intervention, knowledge, and empathy.

The 2023 Forbes Advisor survey of business owners found that AI is perceived as an asset for improving decision-making (44%), decreasing response times (53%), and avoiding mistakes (48%). With the right AI-powered BI platform, business owners can empower their teams with better decision making support. The right insights and decisions can further help improve productivity, minimize risks, and achieve operational efficiencies.

How MachEye Elevates Business Intelligence with AI

MachEye’s AI-powered business intelligence platform is built with AI in its core architecture, rather than just a feature. MachEye connects to any data source without duplicating it, classifies data using an automated data catalog, measures data quality, and provides recommendations to fix data issues and ensure high quality insights.

MachEye’s SearchAI integrates the powers of an Analytics Copilot to offer intelligent search, actionable insights, and interactive stories on your business data. MachEye empowers every user with intelligent search, interactive audio-visuals, and actionable insights. Unlike traditional analytical platforms that only provide answers to "what" questions on data, MachEye offers a comprehensive solution that enables users to answer "what, why, and how" scenarios for everyone in the organization.

Using SearchAI, MachEye’s AI-powered enterprise search, a simple retail user query of “what are the sales this quarter" not only returns the sales figures for the quarter, but also provides the growth comparison to previous years, shows a breakup for sales by region, product, or store, and highlights anomalies if a particular region or product fared exceedingly well or had significant drops in sales along with influencing factors.