We are living in a time in which companies generate and collect a large amount of data, from different sources.
Unfortunately, just a few know how to use this data in a smart and useful way for their business.
It was comprehensible scenario in the past, since purchasing a license for a BI tool and to maintain a team of analysts and data experts to handle with it was extremely expensive
This reality, however, has changed. Nowadays companies can choose from among many analytics tools options that allow them to easily handle their data, gain insights and make data-driven decisions about different areas of their businesses, without significant investment in license or IT infrastructure and with no need to hire data experts.
Why Business Intelligence and Analytics tools are important?
Once you adopt data analysis in your company, you completely change your business, and you start working based on facts. You definitely begin to understand causes of particular events based on your data, to understand what is happening in your business and why. You shift from a reactive analysis to a proactive attitude and have a chance to change the present and build a new future.
Why Traditional tools are no longer enough
If you have already had contact with traditional BI/Analytics tools, you must be thinking that it is complicated and that it requires advanced technical knowledge to use. I can't say you're wrong. In the past, the Business user really had a hard time operating these traditional tools. In addition to being reactive and more time-consuming, the traditional BI tools do not empower the business user to work in a self-service mode. Therefore, the user is always dependent on others (like the IT team, statisticians or data scientists) to analyze their data. How AI is Transforming Business Intelligence and Analytics?
We already know that the augmented intelligence can revolutionize our lives. The question is: how can Artificial Intelligence be added to BI and Analytics world?
Let's dream of a hypothetical perfect scenario:
Imagine that you have one (or many) data sources with a crazy amount of data and you have no idea how to qualify or use it to improve your business. It would be really nice if:
1 - If there is an AI powered tool that could clean and prepare data from multiple sources, add calculated fields, join data, and create new tables, all of this automatically. What if the tool even discovers and classifies the characteristics of your data, and identifies hierarchies among these data? It could even identify which columns should be classified as measure, as geographic, as plain text, tag it and add the corresponding icon with this classification to improve the visualization (Like the image) Have you ever thought how much of our time it would save?
2 - Let's imagine another hypothetical scenario. Wouldn't it be really nice if the BI and Analytics solution use AI to automate data discovery and allow you to explore relationships that you would never notice alone in just a few clicks? I'm sure you could easily find hidden patterns3 - If there was an AI assistant to ask whatever you wanted. You wouldn't need to know what table to look at, you wouldn't need any knowledge of Data Science. You would just explore the data asking natural language questions and you would receive insightful answers to those questions along with a presentation-ready dashboard and reports (and it would also be nice to ask the tool to change the visualization if you don’t like the chart or the dashboard)
4 - What if, this tool also uses artificial intelligence to generate natural language insights that can explain or help you create a narrative about your data? Can you imagine? Automatic insights into your data? Too futuristic?
5 - It would also be really nice if the AI allows this tool to make predictions about what will happen in the future with just 1 click, without needing complicated statistical calculations (with no calculation at all). A forecast feature to that can identify patterns in the past data and estimate future trends.
The good news : Cognos Analytics with Watson
Now that I've made you imagine the hypothetical perfect world, I can bring you the good news. None of what I've cited is hypothetical (at least not for Cognos Analytics users).
AI is rewriting the BI and analytics history and it is found natively in IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson. With IBM Cognos Analytics, you can explore your data and look ahead with predictive forecasting, all using out-of-the-box capabilities. It is a new generation of BI and Analytics Solutions in the same Cognos Analytics you already know and trust. Just Faster Smarter
This means you don't need a data science expertise; you just need to know what to ask.
IBM Cognos Analytics is a personal analytics experience that provides sophisticated data exploration capabilities, dashboarding and storytelling, professional report authoring, and automated data preparation.
All delivered on a single integrated and highly secure platform.
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