Using Artificial Intelligence for Analytics

Analytics are becoming increasingly important in today’s business world. Businesses can access more data than ever before, and the information that can be extracted from that data can be valuable for making decisions. If you are not using analytics at all, you are probably falling behind.

Artificial intelligence has been one factor in making data analytics more accessible to an increasing number of businesses. Instead of needing a data science team on the staff, businesses can now use an AI-powered BI tool to handle many of their data analytics needs.

While this has been great for many businesses, some are still hesitant to go all in. They might not fully understand how AI can help with analytics. If you are thinking about AI analytics tools, this article can explain some of the benefits.

What is artificial intelligence?

In the most basic sense, artificial intelligence involves making smart machines. In the early days, AI was programmed with rules that it had to follow, so it was only the appearance of intelligence. In today’s world, AI can use technologies like machine learning and deep learning to achieve results that are more similar to the intelligence of a human.

You probably already encounter and use these types of advanced AI every day. The voice assistant on your phone is a form of AI. If you get recommendations from your favorite online shopping website, it is done using AI.

What makes these forms of AI amazing is that they are not explicitly programmed to get better at what they do. They learn by experience. A machine learning program can assess its own performance and get better based on the results. When this is applied to data analytics, the results can be incredibly reliable.

What can AI Analytics do for you?

One of the most important things about using AI for analytics is that it makes data science more accessible to people with no expertise. An AI-powered analytics platform makes it possible to get the benefits of analytics through an easy to use dashboard. You can connect it with different data sources, ask it questions and it will provide answers.

Being accessible is good, but what types of features are you getting access to? The most common and useful features are the ability to unify data, providing insights, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics.

Pulling the Data Together

One benefit of these systems is that they can pull data together from multiple sources. You might have data from Google Analytics, inventory management software, invoicing software, customer relationship management systems and more.

 This data can be useful when it is siloed, but it can be more useful when it is unified with data from other sources. An AI-powered analytics platform can connect with different sources and pull all of the data together to create one source. Not only that, it can do this work faster and more accurately than humans.

Providing Insights

AI is really good at identifying patterns in data. If you have a metric you are trying to track, AI can work through vast datasets to find the patterns and deliver insights.

As an example, let’s say you are running ad campaigns on different social media platforms. An AI analytics tool could sort through the data to find the ads and platforms that are offering the best conversion rate or which ones deliver the best ROI. This insight would be valuable because it could indicate that you should spend more resources in one place and less in others.

Making Predictions and Finding Solutions

AI analytics can also be used to predict the future. It can take historical data from a multitude of sources and then look at the current data to forecast where things are going.

 What makes this even more powerful is that many of these systems can then take the predictions and then prescribe actions. The AI will predict a future condition and then come up with possible solutions. It will then model the outcomes of those solutions to find the best approach.

Data is only as useful as what you can do with it. With AI-powered analytics tools, you can do more with your data. You can find insights, get predictions and it can provide solutions. If you are not already using AI for analytics, now is the time to start. Those who wait will be left behind.