Generative AI is redefining business use cases across industries. The World Economic Forum even suggests its possible use case in clinical development to accelerate the process of bringing out new therapies. At the same time, another collaborative research by Forrester and AWS focuses on themedia and entertainment industry and suggests that 76% of makers see Gen AI as a key differentiator.  It’s hardly a surprise that technology is also finding firm ground in business intelligence. 

Business intelligence is an obvious checkpoint in the natural flow of Generative AI. Gen AI can democratize access to complex business analytics while offering business leaders more intelligible insights for decision-making. For BI tools, it can help generate more customized reports, human-understandable data visualization, and better process automation. 

This blog post offers a deeper look into how the growing acceptance of GenAI is good news for BI and its tools.

Why Business Intelligence Needs Gen AI?

Smart business intelligence tools likeAmazon Quicksight are already using what they call Generative BI, which uses generative AI models for different aspects of business intelligence.  Based on the benefits the technology has brought them, we can deduce what our BI tools need Gen AI for.

• Natural Language Interactions: Usual Business Intelligence tools operate on queries crafted by certain experts in SQL or any other such language. However, to truly translate the pain points of business leaders, they need to understand more human-intelligible language.
• Compelling Narratives: Business leaders usually look for narratives rather than charts for a higher-level understanding of business data. Modern BI tools can help with some pattern recognition and interpretation but cannot help with a coherent narrative around this information.
• Report Generation: Although BI tools can offer excellent data visualization, they still need human intervention for more comprehensive reports. They need technology like generative AI to highlight relevant charts and explain various reports.
• Personalization: BI tools offer some level of personalization in dashboard customization, user-specific metrics, etc. However, modern data-driven businesses need more context-aware personalization where these tools can analyze past data to adjust content on their own dynamically. Such a proactive nature can only be offered with generative AI.

What Gen AI Brings for Business Intelligence Tools?

Generative AI has much to offer for BI tools in terms of deeper and more intuitive business analytics. Here’s how embedding Gen AI into BI tools can empower them for more scalable, reliable, and relevant performance.

Better Data Interaction

The natural language content generation offered by Gen AI works both ways. It can help BI tools directly understand human queries while offering more understandable responses. While discussing the latter briefly, let’s look at natural queries. 

• Most business leaders would find itoffering more raw narratives to the BI tools easier an sophisticated and structured queries. 
• Gen AI can make this possible by taking in natural queries like, “Which of our sales channels are performing better and why?” and translating them to refined data that the BI tools can process. 
• It can help automate the generation of various aspects of data processing that must be considered before BI tools convert them into actionable insights. 
• Introducing Gen AI to the equation can enhance the process right from data cleaning to data analysis. 
• The technology can help eliminate inconsistent data formats, normalize datasets, contextualize data as per sources, and finally build predictive models and draw insights.
• It can also help automate various processes to accelerate the entire operation and offer up insights for high-level interpretation and decision-making.

Improved Personalization

Taking personalization a step further, generative AI can help BI tools with more behavior-based adaption of different business use cases.

• It can empower the tools to leverage historical data analysis and proactive data discovery to offer more business-centric intelligence. 

• Monitoring user activities, like frequent checks on specific data points, Gen AI can adjust the BI tool to offer better insights on the data most relevant to their needs. 
• Similarly, if a user follows a pattern with certain kinds of reports (quarterly reports, for instance), Gen AI can help automate generating these reports for its own purpose. 

Simulations for Better Decision-Making

Embedded Gen AI can empower business tools to model different business scenarios and recommend business strategies that can ensure data-driven decision-making. 

• Gen AI can simulate various market conditions, cost shifts, or other factors, offering more data-driven speculations for the business to prepare better. 
• Instead of limiting the BI tools to just historical data, they can enhance their predictive capabilities by incorporating a wider range of variables into business strategies. 

Data-driven Content Creation

Content creation might be the most basic feature of generative AI, but it can do wonders for BI tools. 

• Gen AI can help generate content that will eliminate the need for manual analysis of BI reports.
• The customized content can help structure and summarize the data visualization reports and offer key insights and possible trends for business leaders.
• For instance, embedded Gen AI can help analyze KPIs regarding the performance of a marketing campaign and offer a compelling visualization for a more human-understandable narrative.

Conclusion

Modern-day intelligence needs some element of AI to catalyze it in the right direction. With far-reaching benefits for global businesses, business intelligence cannot possibly shy away from this reality. BI tools rely on gen AI to gain more acceptance across industries as that is the only way they can truly help business stakeholders with more impactful decision-making capabilities. With a more contextual interpretation of business data and a better understanding of natural language, Gen AI can be the mediator that eases BI for business leaders and enhances its features for BI tools.