As a Star Trek fan, I remember how revolutionary it seemed to have a crew member say “Computer, how long before shuttlecraft’s fuel supply forces return to starbase?” and a second later the computer would return the answer.
Captain Kirk never had to pull out a keyboard, fire up a reporting application, find the right report, input his filter and output criteria, and then hunt through the report details for his answer. Or if the report didn’t exist, learn how to use an ad-hoc report builder; or wait for a Reporting Analyst to build the report for him, all while the shuttlecraft was running out of fuel.
Sounds silly when you say it out loud, but that’s the status quo we’ve all been living with. Up until now computers didn’t speak natural language and only a few select employees could speak the computer’s language (SQL – Structured Query Language) to do the reporting translation.
Conversational AI and Natural Language Processing have finally delivered on Gene Roddenberry’s vision of users either saying (or typing) the information they want into their Smartphone or computer and instantaneously having the computer provide them their answers (list, pie chart, bar graph, etc.). View 1 minute video here.
“Conversational analytics and natural language processing (NLP) will boost analytics and BI adoption from 32% of employees to more than 50% of an organizations employees..,”
Gartner, Source: Augmented Analytics in the Future of Analytics
Conversational AI solves 5 Data Access & Self-Serve Reporting problems:
- Non-technical users can instantly answer their ad-hoc data questions by simply saying or typing their information requests into their Smartphone or computer, enabling everyone to make more data driven decisions.
- Real-time problem solving is no longer limited to whether a report, filter, output, or drill down criteria already exists. If the user has data access rights, they can see the data in almost any format they like, in their moment of need.
- Zero training is required and users are immediately productive which dramatically accelerates speed to value and scalability.
- Providing all users with secure access to their data eliminates non-standard reporting backlogs and allows Reporting Analysts to focus on high value standardized strategic reports & executive dashboards.
- Time wasted on repetitive admin tasks such as finding, building or waiting for reports can now be focused on running and growing the business.
Conversational AI solutions easily handle typo’s and disambiguation and learns as new situations arise. They are deployed inside existing firewalls and fit seamlessly into most enterprise, cloud and data warehouse environments. They take almost no internal resources to deploy and can be rolled out to full production in less than a month.
If your users envision a future where they can get the data they want in their moment of need, simply by saying or typing their information requests into their Smartphone or computer, then click here to schedule a demonstration
