As an executive, sales manager or marketing decision-maker, you’re in charge of making important decisions for your company and your team.
From your boss to your colleagues, everyone is eager to get your input on critical questions like, ‘How can we adjust inventory to capture changing market conditions?’ or ‘What were the sales results from the newest product launch?’
Yet you know all too well that with your current Business Intelligence (BI) tools it takes a data scientist or two to generate and interpret reports. That’s because most standard BI softwares are designed with experts in mind. Not only that, but they’re also difficult to customize, slow, and rely on data warehousing and ETL (extract, transform, load) tools that can be prohibitively expensive. Especially if you’re a part of a small or medium-sized consumer facing business, you don’t always have the budget to hire analysts or buy expensive software.
Unlock New Insights With a BI Digital Assistant
What if getting business insights about the performance of your promotional offers was as easy as doing a Google search? What if getting data answers about your most and least profitable items was as simple as talking to Alexa or Siri? Could you really use a BI software to find the answers to these questions – without worrying about how to import data or needing an expert’s advice to know whether you’re looking at the right graph?
This is where conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI), a key part of the new generation of Business Intelligence, comes in. A BI software with conversational AI can give instant voice or text answers just like Google search, Siri or Alexa.
Have you ever asked Siri ‘Where the nearest Italian restaurant is?’ or tried typing in Google, only to have your search question auto-completed before you could even finish writing?
This ability to speak naturally with your BI Software is possible through a form of conversational AI called Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP is a form of AI and Machine Learning (ML) trained with huge amounts of data to read and understand human languages so that it can engage in a natural conversation.
This AI/ML can also comb over a billion data points via your phone, tablet or computer to give you real-time answers in every-day language. Now the same technology that’s behind Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa is being reborn as your own personal Digital Assistant who’s ready to answer all your business questions anytime, anywhere.
What’s Possible with a Personal Digital Assistant?
You know that a BI personal Digital Assistant can be smart, but you also want to understand just how smart they are and what their limitations are.
Even if your data is massive or distributed across many sources, the new scalable BI software is able to rapidly integrate and standardize data from disparate sources so your Digital Assistant can be fully informed. A Digital Assistant can also easily and immediately provide answers to many common categories of questions, such as those listed below, to help you understand your business performance and key drivers.
- Time Periods – Ask for metrics from a specific time period, such as, ‘The last month, Saturdays, or the last year.’
- Comparisons – Evaluate results between two or more groups, such as, ‘Compare the average number of weekly reservations for my Austin v.s. San Jose location.’
- Trends – Understand trends over time for specific measures by asking, ‘Which of my products sales are decreasing?’
- Filtering – Limit the sets of data used in the analysis by specifying a particular value by saying, ‘What were my total purchases in April’ or ‘In New York’
- Best/Worst Performers – Understand your best and worst performers in an instant for a range of metrics by asking, ‘What were the five worst-selling items from last year?’
How Your Personal Digital Assistant Can Transform Your Business
These kinds of insights are only the tip of the iceberg of what an AI-powered personal Digital Assistant makes possible. Today’s Digital Assistants are not only predicting company needs, but are also giving actionable insights to understand ‘what’ and ‘why’ events happened. Let’s examine how these features can help you.
- Conversational Queries. The conversational nature of AI lets you build on your questions or ask a series of queries without restating or giving context. For instance, if you asked your Personal Digital Assistant ‘What are my top ten cities with the highest customer acquisition growth last year?’, you could follow up this question with, ‘Tell me more about Chicago,’ without needing to mention customer acquisition for a second time. This makes interacting with a Digital Assistant just as easy as talking to anyone else!
- Proactive, Personalized Insights. A Digital Assistant delivers more personalized insights that those typically included in standard BI dashboards. Without being specifically asked to do so, these smart systems can automatically and predictively update you with critical information and insights based on past search patterns. Perhaps your digital advertising campaign was more successful that you realized, or one of your essential products is quickly running out of stock. With automated alerts you’re no longer left reacting to what’s happened, but instead are staying ahead of the curve.
- Analyze Your Root-Causes. Think of the breakthroughs possible when your personal Digital Assistant immediately responds to questions like, ‘Why did sales decrease last year?’, with a careful analysis of your product basket mix and insights into changing consumer demographic information!
The ease of interacting with a personal Digital Assistant empowers non-technical business-users to understand what and why events are happening, and most importantly, what to do about them. Why hire a data scientist to spend days assembling reports when your personal Digital Assistant can give you company insights in just a matter of seconds?
Hypersonix: Your Personal Digital Assistant Solution
You may be wondering where to find a BI digital assistant that has so many capabilities. The answer is Hypersonix, an AI-driven BI software that automates analytics and insights in real-time.
Designed for business users instead of analysts, Hypersonix includes a virtual decision assistant (“Jarvix”) to provide predictive and prescriptive insights to help users understand not only “what happened,” but also “why it happened” and “what to do about it.”
Jarvix, the virtual decision assistant, makes business insights easy and readily available to every user through a search and conversational experience designed for retailers, restaurants, hospitality and other consumer-centric companies.
Ready to get started? Request a personalized demo of Hypersonix AI-driven autonomous BI software at sales@hypersonix.io. Or, you can meet Hypersonix in 90 seconds!
✎ by Amy B.
