How Is Artificial Intelligence Changing The Business Landscape?

How is artificial intelligence changing the business intelligence landscape? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Answer by Doug Bordonaro, Chief Data Evangelist, ThoughtSpot, on Quora:

The BI landscape has been evolutionary for the past couple of decades now. While there’s no question that today’s most popular platforms are faster, more scalable, and easier to use than they were in the 90s, that improvement has been driven by incremental changes. The overall paradigm hasn’t changed, however—giving people tools to ask a question and making the answer easier to understand.

AI will escalate those changes. For example, the machine learning behind search suggestions can allow end users to ask questions without significant training. We all know how to use a search bar, after all. And algorithms that pick the best visualization, or decide that the best way to show an answer isn’t a visualization at all, but a table, promise to make the answer easier to understand as well.

But the promise of AI goes further than just rapidly improving the two existing areas of growth. AI adds a third—helping determine the right question to ask in the first place. For example, AI is starting to allow BI technology to:

• Tell you what question you should have asked, instead of just answering the one you did.
• Provide relevant, interesting, additional insights about the question you did ask.
• Identify anomalies in the data that might be actionable and proactively alert a business person that action may need to be taken—even if they’ve never asked a question about that dataset in the past.

Instead of just augmenting the technical features of a product, today’s AI and Machine Learning technology augments the user’s workflow. As we start to see more vendors who have built AI into the core foundation of their product instead of just treating it as an additional feature (“Now with AI!”), we’ll really start to see the value of AI’s promise…not just making BI better, but actually creating new workflows based around answers, not questions.

This question originally appeared on Quora – the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions:

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How is artificial intelligence changing the business intelligence landscape? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Answer by Doug Bordonaro, Chief Data Evangelist, ThoughtSpot, on Quora:

The BI landscape has been evolutionary for the past couple of decades now. While there’s no question that today’s most popular platforms are faster, more scalable, and easier to use than they were in the 90s, that improvement has been driven by incremental changes. The overall paradigm hasn’t changed, however—giving people tools to ask a question and making the answer easier to understand.

AI will escalate those changes. For example, the machine learning behind search suggestions can allow end users to ask questions without significant training. We all know how to use a search bar, after all. And algorithms that pick the best visualization, or decide that the best way to show an answer isn’t a visualization at all, but a table, promise to make the answer easier to understand as well.

But the promise of AI goes further than just rapidly improving the two existing areas of growth. AI adds a third—helping determine the right question to ask in the first place. For example, AI is starting to allow BI technology to:

• Tell you what question you should have asked, instead of just answering the one you did.
• Provide relevant, interesting, additional insights about the question you did ask.
• Identify anomalies in the data that might be actionable and proactively alert a business person that action may need to be taken—even if they’ve never asked a question about that dataset in the past.

Instead of just augmenting the technical features of a product, today’s AI and Machine Learning technology augments the user’s workflow. As we start to see more vendors who have built AI into the core foundation of their product instead of just treating it as an additional feature (“Now with AI!”), we’ll really start to see the value of AI’s promise…not just making BI better, but actually creating new workflows based around answers, not questions.

This question originally appeared on Quora – the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions: