Augmented BI

Why Augmented BI is a must-have for your business?

2021-02-08 00:00:00
15 min read

The information overload in the current era has made it more critical than ever for organizations to extract value from the vast amounts of data available at their fingertips. Organizations have data stored at multiple places and silos, and it gets difficult to keep a track of the data from different sources. They invest in various BI and analytics tools to understand and control this data. 

While these BI tools help businesses to analyze their data, data scientists and technical teams have to spend considerable time and effort in preparing data and drawing and explaining insights from the data for effective decision-making. Augmented Analytics solves this problem and helps businesses by automating the entire process of cleaning and analyzing data, and generating actionable insights out of it. Businesses have already started adopting it for its various benefits.

Before we take a closer look at the importance of Augmented BI for business, let’s understand how Business Intelligence works and how it has evolved from traditional BI to augmented BI. Read on!

Business Intelligence is a collection of strategies and technologies that collate, compile and analyze various aspects of data and translate it into useful insights. The insights generated by BI directly impact the operational, strategic and tactical business decisions. Business intelligence includes processes such as data mining, reporting, descriptive analytics, statistical analysis, data visualization, data preparation, performance metrics and benchmarking, and querying that help in improving performance. 

How does BI really work? 

Business Intelligence tools can unify data from a variety of sources (such as operations, performance, marketing or sales analytics, customer relationship management or supply chain data) and generate accurate insights out of it, which can be fed to decision-makers to run complex reports, all without the assistance of IT teams. It can pool all the data from multiple sources together to provide current, historical and predictive views for better business decisions and planning. The insights generated by BI tools can be used by companies to monitor marketing conditions and trends, track their sales performance, keep a track of their operations, monitor employee productivity, study consumer buying trends, etc. and thereby improve decision making at all levels of the organization. 

From what was accessible only to people with technical and analytical skills, Business Intelligence has evolved into self-service augmented analytics and slowly become an indispensable part of every organization and function.

Traditional BI

The first generation of BI was largely managed by the IT department. It used legacy systems for storage and analysis of data and required technical skills to run queries and generate reports. Moreover, it generated static reports, and the entire process would take days or even weeks to complete.

Self-service BI

The next stage of BI provides visualization and data discovery capabilities that enable business users without advanced technical skills to conduct ad-hoc analyses. It facilitates data analysts to sift through large sets of disparate data and expose hidden trends or outliers in a truly self-service manner. It accelerates the speed of analysis and enables companies to make data-driven decisions in competitive environments.

Augmented Analytics

Augmented BI is the latest evolution in Business Intelligence. As defined by Gartner, Augmented Analytics leverages technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Natural Language Generation to assist organizations with data preparation, insight generation, and insight explanation. It augments data analysis and enables non-technical users and non-data scientists to derive insights from data in just a few clicks through drag-and-drop functionality. Augmented analytics software frees up data scientists and analysts to focus on more high-value tasks by automatically generating high-quality insights, recommendations, data correlation and predictions for effective decision-making.

Augmented data analytics benefits businesses by providing:

  • Valuable insights: With augmented analytics tools, businesses can gauge the overall performance, success, productivity and revenue of their organization. The insights generated give an in-depth analysis of the various KPIs that matter for the overall growth of the business. It can help them uncover hidden trends and opportunities, and understand what’s working and what’s not.
  • Accurate and quick reporting: Augmented analytics automatically generates insights from data in an easy-to-understand language. These insights can be converted into customized reports using templates in real-time. The reports generated using the most relevant data provide insights in the form of plain language along with charts, graphs and visualizations, which helps businesses to act quickly. 
  • Better data quality: Having good quality data is vital for the success of a business. Apart from analyzing data, augmented analytics tools also help in cleaning and preparing data. It aggregates data from various sources and prepares quality data for analysis without any inaccuracies or discrepancies.
  • Accurate decision-making: Companies need to make accurate decisions as quickly as possible to stay at the top. Augmented analytics tools allow users to dig deeper into their data and answer specific questions, which are crucial for their business. With the right insights and recommendations, companies can make the right decisions at the right time, with utmost accuracy and speed.
  • Improved ROI: With the insights generated from augmented analytics tools, companies can track their performance, listen to their customers, improve their operations and keep a check on their competitors, all of which aid in improving their revenue. Businesses can make comparisons and identify their key strengths and weaknesses, to align their efforts towards driving better ROI.

How will Augmented Analytics change the BI landscape?

Augmented analytics can easily uncover hidden patterns and trends in data and help organizations make informed decisions at the speed of sight. The insights generated from the analysis not only tell you ‘what happened’, but also give a deeper understanding of ‘why it happened’ by revealing crucial relationships between data points and providing recommendations in real-time. The insights generated are presented in the form of AI-generated stories using natural language, which makes it easier for users to utilize the insights and take necessary actions.

Moreover, augmented analytics tools also enable users to ask specific questions such as “how did my sales team perform in the past month?” or “how did my company perform as compared to my competitors in the last quarter?” and get detailed explanations and recommendations in real-time. It also makes it easy for users and teams to collaborate and share reports, thereby promoting data democracy and data literacy across the organization.

Augmented Analytics within Phrazor

Phrazor uses advanced AI technologies such as Machine Learning and Natural Language Generation to automatically turn data into actionable insights in natural language, accompanied by visualizations. It automates the entire process of extracting, cleaning, processing, and analyzing data and generating narrative insights, visualizations and reports out of it. 

Check out this video, to watch the tool live in action.

 

The tool has helped companies across industries to:

The Phrazor BI plugin can be easily integrated across BI dashboards such as Power BI, Tableau, SAP, Qlik, and MicroStrategy to understand data through stories and visualizations in natural language. Phrazor also has report templates built for a wide range of business use cases, which can be used by organizations to simply upload their data and generate relevant reports within minutes. Take a look!

 

Simply select the template based on your industry and function, upload your data, and get actionable insights out of it, all within a few clicks.

Wrapping up

Augmented analytics is the future of data and analytics and slowly becoming a must-have tool for businesses. By simplifying the preparation and standardization of data, it is changing how organizations explore and analyze data. Augmented analytics helps businesses stay up-to-date about the changes happening within their business by notifying them of key trends and opportunities that require their attention.

As predicted by Gartner, augmented data analytics is the next wave of disruption in the BI landscape. If you are looking to improve your business intelligence and data analytics processes, now is the time to invest in an augmented analytics software. We, at Phrazor, can help you make augmented bi a part of your business. To know more, get in touch with our experts.

About Phrazor

Phrazor empowers business users to effortlessly access their data and derive insights in language via no-code querying