Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of our lives, and business intelligence (BI) is no exception to this. Businesses are rapidly adopting AI in BI to nurture data-driven decision-making. In this blog, we’ll explore some sought-after AI-powered analytical capabilities on the market today, and how different users are adopting them in their workflows.
BI personas
Users of BI in any business can broadly be categorized into three BI personas: crawlers, walkers, and runners. Crawlers are new to BI, walkers have some prior experience with BI, and runners are BI users with a high level of expertise.
To enable data-driven decisions across a business, and to reap the benefits of data insights, it's important for organizations to drive better BI adoption among these three BI personas. Two simple yet powerful ways of facilitating BI adoption in these personas are:
Bringing about a behavioral change towards BI.
Enabling BI users technologically.
Here's how these changes can be brought about in each of the BI personas.
Crawlers
Crawlers are users that are at a nascent stage of adopting BI.
Behavioral change
Crawlers can be educated about data literacy to understand BI and data analytics better. Data literacy is essentially the ability to read, work, and communicate with data. By introducing crawlers to effective data literacy programs, organizations can bring about a behavioral change in them to facilitate better BI adoption.
Technological empowerment
For beginners in the BI space, the key to embracing BI lies in humanizing data interactions. This means enabling people with even minimal tech knowledge to analyze data and create reports. Today, this can be supported by AI-powered capabilities like conversational analytics. This enables users to hold colloquial conversations with intelligent assistants to gain data insights.
Here's an example of how users can ask questions and get answers instantly through reports. This demonstration is powered by Ask Zia, the ML-powered AI assistant in Zoho Analytics.
Watch our webinar and learn, in detail, about behavioral efforts and advanced analytical capabilities that support the adoption of data analytics in BI personas.
Walkers
Walkers are users who have started their BI journey, but have not quite reached a good level of expertise yet.
Behavioral change
An effective way to drive BI adoption among walkers is by giving them a common goal that can be achieved through data and analytics. They can further be encouraged to collaborate with one another. In this way, by the time they achieve these goals, they gain a deeper understanding of data analytics through peer-group learning.
Technological empowerment
From a technology standpoint, walkers need analytical capabilities that offer more firepower in decision intelligence and reach data insights faster. Prebuilt analytics is among the most relevant analytical capabilities for walkers. Some modern BI platforms offer a wide range of domain-specific prebuilt reports and dashboards upon integration with business apps. Prebuilt analytics offers a wider range of opportunities to perform analysis and cuts the time it takes to gain insights.
Check out the prebuilt Sales Overview Dashboard for the Salesforce CRM connector below. Similarly, you can explore other prebuilt reports and dashboards for the same connector, or for the other connectors you can integrate with Zoho Analytics here.
Runners
Runners are BI users who have a good understanding of BI and data analytics and are already making data-driven decisions for their businesses. While there isn't much scope in bringing about a behavioral change for this segment of users, organizations can focus on technologically empowering them.
Technological empowerment
Businesses operate with multiple variables like costs, sales, and profits. As business leaders, it's important to keep a tab on how these variables impact one another and the business. For runners, this can be among the major focus areas for analysis. A powerful augmented analytical capability that allows runners to be prepared in adverse business situations is "What-If Analysis." This feature enables users to analyze how the change in one variable can impact others.
For a better understanding, you can check out the report embedded below. The report presents the sales trend and sales numbers of a business when the profit percentage is set at 40%. You can change the profit percentage using the slider on the top left-hand side of the report to analyze how it impacts the sales numbers. This is one of the capabilities that can help teams make better data-driven decisions for the future.
Summary
Different BI personas have different analytical needs that can commonly be supported by augmented analytics. By adopting these capabilities, your BI personas can elevate themselves from crawlers to walkers, and from walkers to runners. Ultimately, the more walkers and runners you have in your BI ecosystem, the more data-driven decisions you can expect across your organization.
Check out the complete webinar where we explore various augmented analytical capabilities in detail for crawlers, walkers, and runners.
You can also take advantage of a free personalized demo by one of our experts. Sign up for Zoho Analytics today.
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