Harness the power of AI to boost your business

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is no longer the new kid on the tech scene. It has seeped into nearly every industry, changing how we work, play and live - most would agree for the better. It's proven to have the ability to solve some of the most complex problems and can augment human capacities in powerful ways. It improves efficiency, makes everyday tasks much easier, and removes the strain of menial tasks. And there are so many applications that have yet to be tapped.

Since we are in the game of improving business processes, we will zero in on this space. It's no secret that AI has the potential to transform the way we do business and streamline operations within companies. Machine learning, powered by AI, has enabled several business applications to tackle specialized activities like reading and understanding written text - for instance, feedback or criticism; identifying and categorizing pictures; and recognizing facial features and objects for identification and recommendations. The right implementation and strategies can help reduce operational redundancies - which often come at a high cost - and free up resources for activities with the potential to add value and influence growth,

This will require businesses to look past the fear of AI replacing jobs and taking away agency. As we see with so many companies that have taken the plunge, the focus should be on improving operations.

At AirQuery, we have embraced the power of AI and its ability to transform Business Intelligence (BI) with the new AirQuery Augmatica to accelerate and enhance your business intelligence capabilities.

But before diving into details about it, let's look at how AI simplifies business processes.

AI: Transforming business processes

The benefits of AI in the business space are far-reaching. Let's take a look at some of them.

Operational Automation

One of the key advantages of implementing AI into the operational process is automating certain activities within the process flow. These could be anything from assembly lines to transcribing. The intent behind this automation is to free up employees so that they can focus on high-value tasks. Especially tasks that consume a significant amount of time and resources.

Automation can also be applied to the workflow. To be more efficient, employees must identify flaws and take action to correct them - another time-consuming task. Companies can leverage AI to automate workflow optimization and eliminate inefficiencies, like making employees spend time looking for specific data about a customer.

Marketing

The consumer drives marketing. But in the current scenario, customer-driven complexities are increasing every day. As the needs, desires, and preferences of customers change rapidly, the way companies understand them needs to evolve to keep up to align products with those demands. AI systems can help companies make marketing decisions that get results by leveraging real-time data gathering, trend analysis, and forecasting. AI simulation and modeling techniques can provide reliable insight into consumer personas, helping predict behavior.

Customer Relations

Consumer persona modeling can also determine a customer's lifetime value to a company. AI can also speed up processing customer information and turning it into actionable data. It can handle multiple inputs, process large amounts of data within minutes, and provide valuable insights. Chatbots and similar technologies can also speed up response time to customer inquiries and problem-solving, keeping them happy and engaged.

Decision-Making

Decisions are fueled by data but analyzing vast amounts of data in a short span of time is a demanding task. That's where AI comes in. As we've seen with marketing decisions, it analyzes data and provides valuable insights that drive communication efforts. Similarly, AI also helps with opinion mining, which helps companies understand how customers and non-customers feel the way they do about the brand or products and why. Analyzing this data swiftly allows a company to identify concerns and take the necessary steps to correct them if required. It enables them to predict potential concerns for new products. Smart, effective decisions can be made only when decision-makers have reliable data and insights in time, and AI helps achieve this, eliminating the margin for human error.

Businesses that have harnessed the power of AI to grow

Let's zoom in on how AI has helped some of the world's most well-known companies become more efficient.

Alibaba

This China-based company is the world's largest e-commerce platform, reportedly selling more than Azamon and eBay combined. How does AI fit into their success? For starters, it is an integral element of day-to-day operations, focusing on predicting customer behavior and desires. They also use the technology to generate product descriptions for their website automatically.

What's interesting about how Alibaba uses AI is that the applications go beyond the e-commerce platform. One such use is their City Brain Project, which focuses on smart cities. Here, AI algorithms are used to monitor vehicles and reduce traffic jams. Furthermore, the company's cloud computing division, Alibaba Cloud, is leveraging the power of AI to help farmers monitor crops, improve yield and potentially reduce costs.

Facebook

One of the biggest things social sharing sites need to contend with is heaps and heaps of unstructured data. Facebook effectively uses AI to bring structure to this. DeepText, a text-understanding engine, is tasked with automatically understanding and interpreting content and the sentiment behind them for multiple posts in multiple languages. DeepFace, on the other hand, is an effective facial recognition technology used to identify pictures of users posted across the site. AI also uses artificial intelligence to help combat cyberbullying.

Amazon

Amazon employs artificial intelligence in many ways. They use predictive analytics to study the data on customers' buying habits to recommend items. They have even taken a step further, predicting what they need before they need it and shipping it to them. Alexa, the digital voice assistant, is perhaps the most notable, but AI also plays important roles in day-to-day business.

America's largest e-retailer even set out to hack the brick-and-mortar space with its convenience store concept Amazon Go. It's an entirely cashier-less store with no long checkout queues. The stores are equipped with AI that tracks everything a customer picks up and automatically rings up the charges on the Amazon Go app. The only catch is you have to bring your own bags. Now that's one way to shop.

Merging AI & BI

AI has the power to take businesses to the next level. But what does that mean for Business Intelligence (BI)? Let's explore that, shall we?

For those unfamiliar with BI, the term refers to systems that automate data collection, processing, and analysis on a large scale and provide actionable insights. These insights help companies improve everyday processes and make more informed decisions. However, what needs to be addressed, is that BI does have an inherent flaw that limits the value it can provide. The best example is that BI has a limit on the amount of data it can process, and the sheer volume of data collected is beginning to exceed that limit. That's where AI can come in and fill in the gaps, as AI and BI complement each other very well.

One of the most significant ways that AI revolutionizes modern businesses is through its incredible ability to automate and process data. And automation is always welcomed in business as companies look for cost-effective processes and ways to use their human resources more effectively. AI components are being used largely to improve and streamline existing processes. Albeit, they do have the potential to act as stand-alone solutions.

Effective use of AI can be seen in more and more spaces now, like web design, where machine learning algorithms are employed for suggestions on layouts and font styles based on the nature of the business and its target audience. This enables developers to create aesthetically pleasing sites that convert. Fleet management is another area where AI makes its presence feel like being leveraged to create solutions for commercial freight businesses.

Merging AI and BI is then the next step. AI enables the integration of a wide range of data sources into consistent business processes. And as we pointed out earlier, it assists with the speedy retrieval of information and insights. BI and AI work together consistently to help users better interact and work with these insights. When they work together, they can better guide user decision-making and improve customer interactions.

How does it work?

AI allows a business to compete with other data sources using their own data. While real-time data is being collected, it enables users to detect new patterns and provides actionable recommendations based on trends. It also ensures that users receive data insights as they are required.

Breaking down a large volume of data into granular insights is where business intelligence's true value is felt. It allows companies to grasp the finer points of the big picture. And while its primary function is to analyze and visualize data, the results cannot be generated in real-time, nor can they predict outcomes. When paired with cutting-edge technology like machine learning, AI allows it to generate real-time insights and trends—increasing the value of BI to the organization. To reiterate, BI applications' capacity and functionality are given another layer by AI, enhancing performance. Businesses that employ this combination of AI and BI tend to outperform competitors in generating revenue and overall performance.

How Artificial Intelligence is transforming Business Intelligence Applications

While we've established that AI and BI are a dynamic duo of sorts in improving efficiency and performance, let's take a closer look at how AI is transforming business intelligence applications.

Enhances the capabilities of Business Intelligence

When paired with AI, Business Intelligence is better positioned to break down large data sets into granular insights. It helps businesses better understand the value of minute components, within a broader context, of course.

Additionally, as we highlighted earlier, BI can analyze and visualize large data sets but cannot foresee trends or provide real-time insights in its current iteration. But AI, on the other hand, makes use of cutting-edge technology to do just that. It can draw from the deepest level of historical data and generate forecasts based on new data and trends. It also enables personalization and automation to generate error-free reports. Thereby, the capabilities of BI systems are expanded and their value enhanced.

Bridges the gap

As effective as Business intelligence applications are in streamlining workflow and assisting with decision-making, a gap has emerged between their ability to process data and the rising volume of data, inevitably leaving room for untapped opportunities. AI-enabled applications help bridge that gap, allowing businesses to access vital insights from data that was in all likeliness previously unexplored. It enables them to identify new trends for a company and tap into the power of predictive analysis and language processing to broaden the scope, asses more details, and create more refined and accurate reports.

As more and more organizations look to go beyond relying on dashboards and bridge the gap between visual representation and actionable insights, AI-enabled BI tools are the solution they are looking for.

Simplifies complex procedures

To make informed decisions, BI application users must scan through hundreds of charts and dashboards. As stated earlier, AI makes this easier - thanks to AI-based technologies like machine learning and language processing. A direct result of bridging the gaps between data collection, processing, and actionable insights is simplifying processes.

AI also makes it easier for bots to more effectively understand human language and vice versa, making it easier for data analysts to uncover correlations and insights. AI-enabled BI tools also make analyzing structured and unstructured data easier to offer a wider and more detailed perspective.

Enables better distribution of resources

One of the services BI tools provide is simplifying data so all users can access and understand insights and take action. However, a significant amount of work rests on the shoulders of data analysts - especially for comprehensive, more in-depth analysis of large data sets. But AI can take over some of those responsibilities, breaking down data and making insights more accessible, and recommending suitable actions with the help of technologies like predictive analytics. This allows businesses to free up their analysts for other tasks.

Enables more proactive decisions

Traditional BI tools use historical data to highlight past events rather than future ones, creating a culture of reactive, data-driven decisions. Adding predictive analytics and data-driven decision-making enables more forward-thinking and innovative choices. It allows proactive actions that can prevent damage and improve. For instance, hospitals that use BI to track re-admissions can identify subsets of patients with a high risk of re-admission using AI capabilities. AI also enables dynamic and definite metrics to measure success, compensating for the sometimes static rules that BI systems follow. This helps reduce the chances of missed opportunities. The insights delivered by AI predict trends, optimize logistics operations, and set pricing. Businesses may adjust supplies according to perceived demand.

While BI solutions can explain a problem, AI can take the next step and offer solutions. It unlocks several data-based use cases that enable businesses to convert data into marketable products or services. Overall, it shifts gears and enables businesses to be more proactive.

How can AI-powered Business Intelligence help businesses that AirQuery supports?

The ultimate goal behind introducing AI into AirQuery's Business Intelligence tools is to take supporting our customers to the next level. The end result we envision is helping them streamline processes, make effective decisions in real-time, and improve overall communication, both within their organizations and with customers, more so than we already do.

The idea is to offer next-level data solutions to BI application users by enhancing the tools they already use daily. It adds another layer that enables instant access to accurate data that can be trusted and carefully derived insights to refine real-time data-driven decisions further.

Our AI-powered Business Intelligence tools will impact several departments in an organization like procurement, inventory, HR generalists, support teams, etc. The new AI technology will enhance interactions with the BI applications helping them save time, source information more quickly, and respond more efficiently.

Introducing AirQuery Augmatica

AiQuery Augmatica is our new AI tool designed to understand business questions and help users instantly answer these questions without having to examine charts and dashboards. Users can search for information across enterprise applications or data warehouses and avail quick and accurate data and insights, helping accelerate and enhance the overall BI experience and reporting activities.

AirQuery Augmatica: Taking Business Intelligence to the next level with AI technology

Organizations today are locked in a race, not just with competitors but with themselves, to do better and improve performance and efficiency. The way to do this is to adopt intelligent applications that enhance day-to-day performance, automate tasks to lighten the load on employees and make real-time data and insights more accessible so that crucial decisions can be made without delay. AirQuery's BI tools already help simplify and enhance processes to an extent. By combining them with AirQuery Augmatica, we are further enhancing the efficiency of our existing tools and making data-driven insights all the more accessible.

A successful business and Business Intelligence depend on how we solve problems. AirQuery Augmatica has been designed to solve several problems affecting businesses today, ranging from an overwhelming velocity of data and questions to chaotic situations.

It is a zero-touch technology that sets businesses up for success with minimum time, effort, and configuration complications.

It will enable users to:

• Effectively deal with time constraints
• Locate the correct information with ease and avoid falling into the trap of incorrect or outdated information
• Simplify complex and inflexible data structures and systems
• Provides a contextual layer to existing BI data
• Execute jobs effectively

AirQuery is also designed to infuse AI technology to look up both metadata and real-time data to provide augmented results. AirQuery Augmatica offers two features that help users: Smart Lookups and Discovery.

Smart Lookups

AirQuery Quicklets can help you get precise, context-specific information at your fingertips in no time. Smart Lookups like Quicklets bring up specific information for specific users for specific functions if it follows the principles of Accessibility, Simplicity, Accuracy, and Potential (ASAP).

Quicklets can assist with setting up a system to access information on business-critical dimensions. They can be figured to source data from several real-time sources or a central source, ensuring that all team members have access to the same information. It helps democratize data by eliminating miscommunication, poor coordination issues, and the need to sift through large data sets. Getting insights can also mean navigating multiple screens at one time, especially if you are looking for specific data plus additional screens for other data. Quicklets smartly arranges the data, pulling everything a user needs in one place.

Quicklets can also be used to access information on multiple parameters, from quantity available to warehouse locations and proximity to a customer to expected delivery or restocking time, in the case of product delivery business. Managers can access the entire inventory on a screen in seconds without compiling data from different sources. Quicklets also allows users to send requests, asking for data that might be missing, which the relevant department or team member can then tackle. Quicklets also works efficiently with real-time data to bring in contributions from different sources and users, constantly enriching the data bank. Users can also create multiple Quicklets to ensure that their teams have all the essential information at their fingertips. They are the ideal way to empower employees with the data they need to make efficient, informed, and swift decisions that make a huge difference to a company.

Discovery

The Discovery Ask AI technology allows users to explore and search for their own data trails by asking questions with the help of a natural language interface.

Whether a user needs to generate a financial report or look up a contact detail to fill out an invoice, all the information can be accessed in seconds.

The last word

To sum it all up, AirQuery Augmatica is designed for efficiency. This breakthrough technology offers sophisticated searches that are comprehensive, consolidated, and complete. The results combine real data and metadata, and thanks to its one-view approach, all data is accessible from one place - so yes, no more shuffling through multiple systems and screens to find specific data. This includes data from organizational reports and business applications. AirQuery Augmatica helps simplify and enhance day-to-day operations so that companies can focus on what they do best and set their sights on bigger, loftier goals. At the end of the day, it's just a smarter way to do business.

You can learn more about AirQuery Augmatica and how it can help transform your business at www.airquery.com