By Ekin Keserer
With artificial intelligence (AI) becoming increasingly popular, you might think that it’s just a buzzword or that it’s confined to fancy self-driving cars and showing you what to watch on Netflix. Well, we’ll tell you, it’s not.
In fact, AI is changing the way we live. It directly impacts the way we shop online, how we communicate, and how we’re entertained. AI technology is everywhere around us, from deep learning and natural language processing systems to autonomous vehicles and intelligent robots. Simply put, it’s reshaping our connected world.
But it doesn’t stop there. AI is also fundamentally changing how businesses operate, how they manage their business processes, and how they implement new strategies for more success.
Businesses are now capable of gathering more data than ever before. As such, AI is fast becoming instrumental in the world of business analytics. It helps businesses gain valuable insights from their data. This enables them to deliver better customer experiences, make better decisions, grow faster, and make more money.
But, how exactly does AI contribute to better business intelligence? In this post, we’ll delve deeper into the topic of AI and why it’s so crucial for next-generation business intelligence.
Why Business Intelligence?
Before looking at how AI can contribute to more efficient and profitable businesses, let’s first recap what exactly business intelligence is. Business intelligence (BI) refers to technologies or tools that businesses can use to collect, store, and analyze their business data.
Here, think, for example, of dashboards, reports, and visualizations that summarize data in understandable and actionable ways. With these tools, businesses can understand and manage their business data better, which, in turn, allows them to make better decisions and improve their processes.
But here’s the problem. While a business’s data can improve its understanding of its users, product, and market and, as a result, its decision-making ability, it doesn’t show them where the business is heading or make any decisions based on it.
That’s where artificial intelligence comes in.
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial intelligence (AI for short) is when computer systems exhibit human-like traits which they achieve through specific algorithms. As such, it’s able to learn, solve problems, and make decisions much like a human can.
To do this, AI models learn from the historical data they’re trained on. Once trained, they’re able to apply what they’ve learned to predict outcomes based on new information. So, simply put, they process information and act on it much in the same way that the human brain works.
AI models can perform tasks like:
- Read and classify text data. This includes things like Twitter feeds, user reviews, and emails.
- Detect the tone of interactions. This can include interactions in a chat session or through voice interactions.
- Classify images and identify objects in them. It can detect basically any object in an image and classify images based on what’s in them.
- Pattern recognition. This enables it to identify trends in data like the seasonality in product sales
- Forecast Key Performance Indicators. This enables the model to predict things like revenue and commodity prices
Considering the above, AI can use what it learned from data to attempt to predict the future. So, much like an AI model can finish the sentences in an email, it can predict the revenue a business will generate for a specific period.
Because AI systems are exceptionally well-suited to sorting through vast amounts of data, it’s perfectly suited to Business Intelligence (AI).
The Interaction Between AI and BI
As stated before, businesses nowadays are gathering more data than ever before. It’s simple, with more people shopping and communicating online, the amount of data generated is staggering.
Because of this, businesses can no longer just rely on traditional BI tools to analyze their data and gain valuable insights from it. So, to develop effective business strategies, improve their decision-making, and increase their efficiency, businesses need more tools. If you need help making sense of the data, you can contact companies like Marketing Mix Modeling Intelligence to help you out. As such, the only way in which businesses can make sense of the vast amounts of data they have available is through AI.
AI lets businesses:
- Understand their data. With AI, businesses can use business intelligence to work with larger volumes of data in order to spot underlying trends much faster than they were previously able to.
- Get deeper insights. Apart from understanding their data better, businesses can gain deeper insights from their data. This is even more so when they amplify their data with supplemental data from other external sources that help them to identify patterns and trends.
- Simplify complex processes. Through the use of technologies like natural language processing and machine learning, businesses can automate many arduous tasks. This allows them to improve their operational efficiency and engineer better customer experiences.
- Achieve growth. When businesses are able to make better decisions faster, they’re able to grow.
Considering these benefits, it’s understandable why businesses would want to combine business intelligence with artificial intelligence and machine learning. It can be an excellent investment for a business. So, even though both AI and BI are different tools with different distinct purposes, they complement each other perfectly and allow businesses to make decisions based on the vast amounts of data they collect daily.
In simple terms, these two technologies enable next-generation business processes and automation while giving businesses the opportunity to gain valuable insights from their data, make better decisions, and increase their operational efficiency.
It’s no wonder that BI with AI is gaining popularity in many of the largest businesses in the world. For example, General Electric and Siemens use it to monitor their equipment and schedule preventative maintenance. This, in turn, improves the upkeep of their machinery.
Likewise, Walmart uses AI and BI to optimize the staffing in their stores and Amazon uses it to optimize their supply chain based on customer demand.
The Bottom Line
With more business data being generated now than ever, the future of business intelligence lies with artificial intelligence. It will allow businesses to get deeper insights than previously impossible. This, in turn, allows them to develop better strategies, spot and take advantage of trends, and make better decisions.
This, ultimately, leads to more growth and success.
About the Author
Ekin Keserer is a co-founder of Akkio, where he focuses on driving the company’s mission of democratizing AI by building simple and easy-to-understand user experiences. Prior to Akkio, Keserer worked on making various powerful new technologies accessible such as metal 3d printing and big data analysis at places like Markforged and Palantir.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/akkioHQ
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/akkio
