Data, data, and more data. From the online purchases you make to the apps you download on your phone, data is everywhere and it’s being generated at a rapid pace. In fact, It is estimated that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every single day and more than 180 zettabytes of data will be generated every year by 2025. For businesses, access to additional data can mean more insights that lead to better-informed decisions. However, while big data can be beneficial, it can also be overwhelming. It would be impossible to sift through it all to glean the most meaningful insights for your organization.
Luckily, business intelligence and artificial intelligence tools can make your job a little easier — actually, a lot easier. Let’s take a look at the differences between BI and AI, the benefits of each, and how they work together to make a positive impact on your productivity and decision-making.
What Is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence (BI) refers to the use of software and cloud-based tools to gather and analyze business data that will inform business decisions. Many BI platforms provide company-wide access to key business data in real time, allowing any employee within any department to take advantage of customized reporting and data visualization tools to help streamline the data analysis process.
From identifying customer behavior trends to understanding employee satisfaction to streamlining processes, BI tools have the potential to unlock a treasure trove of insights that can set businesses on a path to success.
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial intelligence (AI), on the other hand, is the development and use of intelligent software that would typically require human intelligence to complete specific tasks. In other words, AI refers to the creation of machines that have the ability to think like humans, learning from past experiences and mimicking human problem solving and decision making. (Think Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri.)
A major benefit of AI is the sheer amount of data it can process at lightning speed, much faster than any human brain could. It has the ability to identify trends, predict outcomes and make recommendations that can then be reviewed by humans for consideration and further analysis.
BI and AI: A Powerful Combination
Now, BI and AI are each powerful in their own right, but when the two work together, look out. It’s just the tip of the iceberg as businesses begin to infuse AI into their BI solutions. For starters, organizations will have the ability to better manage the mountains of big data gathered from a variety of sources, glean insights at record-breaking speeds and receive data-based recommendations for an effective plan of action.
Moreover, utilizing the magic of machine learning technology, as AI-powered BI tools acquire more data related to user interactions and generated outcomes, over time they become “smarter,” which ultimately results in more efficient data analysis and more useful business insights.
For instance, AI can help users methodically assess the potential consequences of proposed actions of a business plan to help decision makers flesh out the best option. Other advantages of AI and BI working together include automation of routine tasks and a decreased likelihood of human error.
The Emergence of Explainable AI
There is no doubt AI will continue to play an increasingly larger role in how we manage and analyze data and generate business insights for critical decision-making. That is if the stakeholders using that data trust and understand where those insights are coming from. Incorporating explainability into your AI tools is critical. This is where explainable artificial intelligence comes in.
Explainable AI (XAI) refers to tools or methods that help human users understand, and most importantly, trust the BI/AI outputs created by machine learning algorithms. XAI is extremely important to end users across a wide variety of industries as AI-generated recommendations and decisions can have major impacts on processes, financial investments, and even personal safety.
XAI can also help address legal and ethical concerns. For example, in the healthcare industry, AI could provide new recommendations on how to care and prescribe medication for patients. Before taking action, healthcare providers need to understand how and why the recommendations were developed. Or in manufacturing, AI could map out a more efficient process for constructing buildings using heavy machinery. Before moving forward with AI’s recommendation, workers need to feel comfortable with the reasoning behind the process change.
The Future of BI and AI
AI and BI are transforming the way businesses access and analyze data, increasing productivity and decision-making power. As we look toward the future, there is no doubt AI technology will continue to impact BI in more ways than we can imagine, helping businesses gain insights, make decisions and develop impactful action plans faster and more effectively than ever before.
Want to learn more about AI and BI tools and how they can help you produce actionable insights? Find out how Maven Wave helps enterprises leverage the power of data.
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