Data derived intelligence is the key to winning in the digital economy. Today, every business is adapting to the digital way of reaching out to their customers. This has in fact become a necessity if businesses want to compete and survive in the market. And as businesses are transforming themselves digitally, the value that data provides them is becoming crucial. Since organizations rely on data-based decision making now more than ever before, the value provided by data has to be made more strategic than just tactical.
However, deriving intelligence from the data is an extremely complex process given the data environment is evolving and the firms face a number of challenges in embracing the changing data environment.
The major reasons of such complexity are
- Long chain cycles: Most of the organizations are able to set up their data sets as per certain use cases but find it difficult to introduce new ones due to long gestation periods.
- Managing ongoing deluge of new data: In today’s world, consumers are available at different channels and the businesses need to gather their consumers’ data from all these different channels which are available in different forms and shapes. Managing such a wide variety of data isn’t a smooth process for a lot of organizations.
- Low BI tool adoption: In a study, it was found that the enterprises are not proactive in adopting BI tool implementation. Even big organizations have a penetration of a mere 35% when it comes to BI tool implementation. With such a low BI tech adoption or relying on traditional BI platforms can prove to be detrimental to business agility.
- Data variety and complexity is beyond comprehension: The amount of data generated daily is just mind-boggling. And as much as 90 percent of that data is defined as unstructured data. Moreover, data that is defined as unstructured is growing at 55-65 percent each year. To fully realize the potential of unstructured data, organizations need to knock down data silos in favor of a scalable data hub. Organizations need to have a data model to store, analyze and report data and share it with decision makers and uncover the enormous business value of unstructured data.
- Need for transaction level intelligence: As the granular decision making is increasing with improved data collection and insights derived from it, so is the need for transaction level intelligence.
According to Gartner, the traditional data and analytics methodologies cannot satisfy digital business demands. Thus, it can be well interpreted that the current data environment is dynamic and will have to be upgraded continuously to meet the futuristic needs of businesses. This is where Augmented Intelligence comes into play.
So what actually is Augmented Intelligence? It is a design pattern for a partnership model of people and Artificial Intelligence (AI), working together to unlock the intelligence from data and accelerate the entire data to actions journey. When humans partner with machines, it opens up new possibilities for organizations to focus more on meaningful projects. A right amalgamation of human efforts and AI is what differentiates leaders from the rest.
Augmented Intelligence enables you to take Assistive Decisions in the form of patterns, outliers, predictions and recommendations. On the other hand, it also enables you to take Executive Decisions through its capabilities of analytical thinking, designing strategies and managing exceptions. If the assistive traits of Augmented Intelligence are applied strategically to yield better performance, then eventually its executive application too can be sharpened and all the KPIs of the decision making process can be addressed well.
And looking at the evolution of Analytics over the years and the business value AI implementation will create in the coming years, it is safe to say that every business aiming to win in the digital economy must embrace Augmented Intelligence across the data value chain.
The next question is how to get started with Augmented Intelligence at your organization across the data value chain? Here are 5 aspects to leverage AI at your organization:
- Democratize your data assets: A lot of large and medium sized organizations have been able to successfully garner data but still lack the expertise to analyze it to its maximum potential and unleash the power of data assets. To solve this deficiency, we have introduced a concept- Data-as-a-service where data will be stored in a central repository and be made available on-demand so that the business user can process it fast. This data will also be well governed, supported by a mechanism that converts legacy data sets to a compatible one, so that all the business users can utilize it to gain insights.
The key roles in this entire process will be played by data engineers and expert data scientists who will be responsible to prepare data sets, data stewards who will be responsible to govern accessibility to these data sets and business users who will derive insights from such data sets.
- Consumer-oriented insight generation: The next aspect after making data available to business users is to generate consumer insights through automation. These insights will be presented to the users in the form of dashboards empowered by ML algorithms and Natural Language Generation that interact with data systems to provide the best accessibility.
The data visualization on dashboards will also generate root cause analysis and key driver analysis that will help your organization to serve the consumers in a more personalized manner
- Embedded Analytics: Until the end users enjoy the benefits of Augmented Intelligence, its purpose cannot be fully served. Through embedded analytics, the data and insights generated in the first two steps will be made available to the sales team on the platform of their choice. For example, making the data visualisations, analysis and reports available to the distribution team on mobile/ tablet services that provides them easy accessibility while saving time. As a result, the adoption of AI will be across departments and divisions and will allow a consistent flow of information.
- Augmented Workflow: This aspect will ensure that the traditional workflow gets updated and automates all the intermediate steps right from the hypothesis stage to the actions. Automation of the intermediate, repetitive tasks will save a lot of time while letting the decision makers focus more on strategic operations. Automation will improve the overall efficiency of the organization's performance.
- Data Evangelization: Data evangelization is an important step to have proficiency in working with, analyzing and arguing with data. The adoption of such technologies that enable data backed decision making is as low as 24%. But here’s an interesting fact, 85% of data-driven executives perform significantly well than others. Hence, it becomes important to establish such data models at your organization to sustain competitive advantage in the market.
To begin with, establish a data-driven culture through Data Evangelists who encourage others to adopt new data techniques and tools. These influencers have the capability to build an entire ecosystem of collaboration around data sets and modelling tools. The organization can easily utilize developments made in any part of the organization without redoing them.
Analytics is becoming more agile and pervasive with Augmented Intelligence. However, it's true benefits will be realized by organizations that follow Data Evangelization as a mission.
How to embark on the AI journey?
The capabilities of Augmented Intelligence are promising and will enable organizations to stay ahead of the curve, deliver new insights for competitive advantage, and keep up with the pace of innovation.
A lot of organizations have already benefited from the adoption of this technology. It’s time for your organization too to reap the benefits. Embark on your Augmented Intelligence journey with us. To know more about its implementation, contact us.
Would you like to know more about Augmented Intelligence? Here's an on-demand webinar with demonstrations on how Augmented Intelligence can be leveraged at your organziation.