Generative AI (Gen AI) can help businesses everywhere make smarter decisions. Popular Gen AI tools such as ChatGPT have seen tremendous adoption. Under the hood, these tools are trained to help computers infer, understand, and communicate information similar to how the human brain acquires, stores, applies, and shares knowledge.
Gen AI tools are fueled by massive amounts of data that help them understand desired outcomes and create incredible, intuitive content designed to meet a user’s prompted specifications. Since business intelligence (BI) has long been helping organizations make sense of their data, significant advances in Gen AI will also prove to be disruptive to the BI space.
Breakthroughs in natural language technology, cloud computing, and data science are making this possible. But many people still want to know – how will the convergence of Gen AI and BI impact their profession?
What does Gen AI mean for business intelligence?
At its best, BI transforms an organization’s ability to process and derive meaning from all sources of business information to drive better decisions.
To achieve impact, BI must be based on a sophisticated data fabric that weaves together raw data, data definitions, business logic, security privileges, and governance rules. This data model enables users to find, explore, and interact with trusted facts and insights about their business.
How can Gen AI improve the current state of business?
Advanced data storytelling
With Gen AI, BI solutions can explain the context behind a dashboard or its underlying data without being predefined or hard-coded. Users can simply ask a question and receive an accurate answer and contextual explanation through a seamless, chat-like experience.
Efficient content creation
BI tools offer great flexibility in what users can build, usually limited only by the developer’s time allotted to the task. With GenAI, simple prompts can create sophisticated dashboards in seconds, freeing up time to focus on improving analytics and the user experience.
Automated advanced analytics
BI has long empowered data scientists to perform deep statistical analysis and visualize results, but it can be complicated and require IT involvement. Gen AI can make data and tool integrations more seamless by simply passing the right information to the underlying tools.
What are the challenges of Generative AI?
Gen AI presents opportunities to improve not only BI, but all aspects of how businesses operate. Process automation in IT, message creation for sales, and content generation for creative disciplines are just a few of the many ways organizations are experimenting with Gen AI today.
But like any emerging technology, Gen AI still has drawbacks that are important to understand. Gen AI is probabilistic, meaning that each answer is based on probability rather than certainty. The exact same questions can often yield different results, leaving users distrustful of the information at hand. The extensive model training process that powers it can also be expensive and time-consuming.
Why are AI + BI better together?
The combined power of generative AI and a secure analytics foundation will revolutionize how businesses everywhere use and apply data.
Customized user experiences
BI today can deliver a range of interactive, intuitive user experiences. Analytics solutions that enable data storytelling with extensive customization and easy embeddability are a great way to improve how users access and interact with AI-powered insights.
Deployment flexibility
Scalability, speed, and superior service are among the many reasons organizations choose to run BI and AI in the cloud. Because Gen AI works best in the cloud, BI vendors that offer flexible deployment strategies with rigorous security add significant value to AI and analytics.
Essential expertise
Strong BI practices are built by experts who understand how to build a comprehensive data layer with robust user security, governance, and trust. When data analytics is done well, these same core principles help solve the most common challenges in Gen AI.
Foundational data fabric
Gen AI performs better and is more accurate when paired with BI. When built on the same trusted data model behind an organization’s data analytics, Gen AI delivers accurate, secure, and governed real-time insights with conversational context – something Gen AI can’t do alone.
Summary
The data fabric for most organizations weaves together a wide variety of sources and types. For both Gen AI and BI, users can more easily answer business questions when the tools they use to find insights seamlessly connect to and effectively process all business data.
Gen AI provides advanced natural language capabilities that enhance data analysis. By integrating AI with trusted data, organizations can unlock the full potential of modern analytics.
