Affecto Oyj : AI in BI – 3 Ways How Artificial Intelligence Will Change Self-Service Applications

Artificial intelligence isn't just for bringing science fiction stories to life anymore. Step by step, AI has taken over the business world and our daily life as well.

The most well-known example how any of us, even our kids, might use artificial intelligence every single day is Siri, the personal assistant on Apple devices that you can speak to. Siri activates when she hears her name and helps you based on your spoken request.

If we can exploit artificial intelligence in our private lives, why not to take the full benefit of it when making critical business decisions? In this post, we'll explain three ways how AI is going to change self-service BI in the near future.

#1 Natural language search is coming to self-service

The way you talk to Siri or a chatbot on your local garage's website, or the way how you type in questions in the help box on your computer, is like talking to a friend or a colleague standing next to you. Instead of listing different keywords, you're using full, understandable sentences; What's the weather going to be like tomorrow? What's the tallest building in the world?

This is called natural language search, and it's the artificial intelligence that has made it possible.

This trend is fast coming to self-service analytics; Using natural language to ask specific questions you want to find answers to. Instead of the weather or the tallest building, you'll be asking questions like 'what will we sell next month' or 'why did we miss the sales target for Q2 this year'.

The machine will then understand the context and provides you with the correct answer based on the data available, continuously improving its ability to answer through trial and error, building its knowledge upon success.

It's a feature to wait for, don't you think?

#2 If you only could predict the future for business decisions

Believe it or not, it's already possible. Kind of.

When you're using your self-service tool, you'll look at the figures to see what has happened and when to find out why it happened and what are the trends that made it happen.

With predictive analytics, you'll be able to look into the future and predict what will happen based on the history; What and why something has happened before-and when is it going to happen again?

In predictive analytics, it isn't just about the facts and figures from the past but about blending in other elements which could explain what's going to happen in the future. For example, you could use the weather forecast to try to predict the sales of soft drinks or maintenance needs of vehicles.

Predictive analytics is something that has been extremely difficult in the past but what modern self-service tools have made possible.

The obstacles of predictive analytics are finally gone-or at least they have significantly decreased.

#3 Machine learning will automate the predictive analytics

Predictive analytics exploits numbers and figures to predict what's going to happen. With the help of AI, we'll be able to teach the machine to learn from the figures. We can also blend in other elements like text, speech, pictures, video, and other unstructured data.

As a part of AI, machine learning enables a more advanced way of creating predictive models. Of course, you'd be able to create them yourself, if you were a skilled engineer or a statistician, but thanks to machine learning, the models will be built for you automatically.

What's different from us humans, the machine won't create just any predictive models-it'll create the best ones. Out of hundreds and hundreds of models, the machine will pick the best ones specifically for you.

This is a trend that we'll only see increasing in the future; The machines will be doing things that humans are not good at, or they don't much care about. Like the predictive work.

What else is trending in the world of self-service analytics right now?

Downloading our new trend report you'll find out the recent changes, the future changes as well as the benefits and challenges of self-service analytics. This trend report will not only give you reasons why you should start using self-service right now but also how to get started with SSA with a few simple steps.

Are you ready to take your business to a whole new level? Download the report now!