What is Contextual Decision Intelligence?

As humans, we always look for contextual cues to understand and respond better to situations. If your maps app shows unusually high traffic on your usual route to work, you decide to take an alternate route. The weather app’s warning about showers on a sunny day helps you decide what to wear and reminds you to carry an umbrella. Understanding the context helps us in making the right choices.

Similarly, understanding the context behind existing and emerging business situations can help decision makers convert opportunities successfully, identify problems early, and adapt strategies quickly by making the right decisions.

What is Contextual Decision Intelligence?

Contextual decision intelligence (CDI) leverages the business context and provides a clear understanding of various business metrics and influencing factors at play behind trends so that decision makers can make confident and accurate decisions easily.

Contextual decision intelligence uses artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, natural language processing, and automation to reveal patterns and relationships around business metrics and recommends specific actions for improved performance.

The recent rebound and rebooting of economies saw a shift from Data Intelligence to Decision Intelligence. Gartner included decision intelligence in its top trends for 2022 and predicted that 33% of large organizations will begin implementing decision intelligence by 2023. Contextual decision intelligence has since been elevated from a marketing buzzword to a crucial business strategy. With contextual decision intelligence, organizations can build an integral process to track, learn from, and improve decisions.

Every business decision, whether day-to-day or critical, has an impact on how an organization performs. Contextual decision intelligence makes it possible for every decision maker to understand “what” happened, uncover “why” it happened, and know “how” to proceed in the best possible manner.

With contextual intelligence, decision makers get focused guidance and targeted recommendations to make decisions quickly.

How do Contextual Decision Intelligence platforms work?

A Contextual Decision Intelligence connects directly to data spread across silos, distills it to extract insights, and makes them easily accessible and understandable for decision makers. When users enter their questions in simple words, the CDI platform understands the question, runs ambiguity checks, and offers contextual suggestions and prompts to help refine the question. The answer is presented in various visualizations that help users drill down and explore better.

The CDI platform also finds answers to questions related to the user’s original question. This provides users with a larger contextual picture and saves them the effort of asking follow-up or related questions. Furthermore, if any anomalies, analogies, clusters, trends, patterns, or correlations are found in data, the CDI platform delivers such advanced insights without any extra effort so that users gain a comprehensive understanding of the what, why, and how of business events.

To make these insights consumable, the CDI platform presents them as interactive audio-visual that are easy to understand and share with others. Thus, with just one search query, a CDI platform empowers decision makers to converse with data in natural language and to discover related information, advanced insights, root causes and influencing factors, without technical expertise or acquiring additional skills.

Here are some examples of how Contextual Decision Intelligence platforms can help organizations improve their operations.

• Store managers of FMCG products can decide on how much and which items to stock using CDI on customer behavior during adverse environmental predictions, like hurricanes.
• Lenders can understand creditworthiness and process loan applications faster by applying CDI on credit scores, requested amount, purpose of loan, and other influencing factors.
• Organizations can improve operations, reduce warehouse costs, and streamline supply chains by using CDI to forecast demand.
• Healthcare providers and hospitals can use CDI to prepare better in terms of availability of beds, medicines, medical staff, and other facilities as seasons change and infections rise.

What are the key benefits of implementing Contextual Decision Intelligence?

Contextual decision intelligence benefits organizations across industries in the following ways:

Enhance human decision-making

At times, errors and biases can creep into human decisions, especially in high-pressure situations. This is simply due to our limited capacity to process data. Contextual decision intelligence takes the busywork and guesswork out of decision-making.

Overcome insight gap

When there is too much data and too many insights, it can get confusing to select the right course of action. This inability to pick the right option often results in analysis paralysis among decision makers, leading to hasty and faulty decisions. Contextual decision intelligence helps close the insight gap and overcome analysis paralysis by presenting the most suitable option upfront, without overwhelming decision makers.

Get real-time insights and root cause analysis

Contextual decision intelligence goes beyond the obvious to deliver the What-Why-How of business situations. decision makers get instant access to anomalies, clusters, or trends from their data. They are able to identify the exact root causes without investing their efforts and time in doing the research. Instead of worrying about analyzing data, they can focus better on applying their learnings and taking quick actions.

Make better decisions faster

By automating several steps in the data analysis process, contextual decision intelligence can accelerate insight discovery and improve the speed of decisions. While making users self-reliant with self-service analytics, decision intelligence also ensures that users are guided with accurate insights to reach their decisions faster. It becomes a trusted personal business companion to every decision maker.

Scale and sustain easily

As businesses grow and responsibilities widen, decision makers find it challenging to track all business drivers simultaneously, identify all variables, and monitor industry trends. Contextual decision intelligence provides the ability to handle volumes of data and scale analysis smoothly to match the requirements. This ensures a sustainable flow of insights and support for decision-making.

How to get started with Contextual Decision Intelligence in your organization?

The first step is to start evaluating CDI platforms. While evaluating a decision intelligence platform, look for abilities such as easy data integrations, customizable machine learning models, configurable AI algorithms, and natural language processing. Additionally, a simple and intuitive user interface that enables users to interact with data naturally ensures that they can do their own analysis without learning new skills or depending on analysts.

MachEye’s decision intelligence platform delivers root cause analysis, identifies key drivers, and explains the what-why-how of business events in just a single search. With its intelligent search, actionable insights, and interactive audio-visuals, MachEye augments the decision-making process and makes insight discovery fast, engaging and interactive.