What is Self-service BI and how it can benefit your business?

Every forward-thinking organization has already grasped it: fast, accurate and easily accessible data lies at the heart of timely and confident decision-making. Waiting days or even weeks to analyze your data for actionable insights is no longer an option. Real-time intelligence is not just a ‘nice-to-have’ anymore. That’s where AI-powered self-service BI solutions can make a big difference.

Speed and agility in decision-making are those key factors that contribute to business success in today’s fast-paced data-driven world.

What are self-service business intelligence benefits?

Business Intelligence tools have come a long way since the days when they could be mainly used by data analysts for generating basic reports and eventually morphed into AI-driven self-service analytics systems forward-leaning businesses can’t do without on their path to becoming data-driven. Data democratization and hassle-free data access that self-service BI delivers can benefit a company in a variety of ways. Key benefits of self-service BI include:

• Speed to insight Enabling users to communicate in natural language, NLP and NLG capabilities in self-service BI tools democratize data science, thereby facilitating interaction between users and BI systems and making data insights easily accessible to non-tech-savvy decision-makers from across the organization when needed. Easy-to-use and AI-powered, self-service BI solutions provide non-data scientists with an intuitive way to extract data, organize it, structure, analyze, generate natural language insights, visualize them and create reports on an ad hoc basis — all without the supervision of expert data scientists. No advanced database skills required. No need to depend on data experts. No lengthy time-to-insights. Just enter your query in plain language and get data-driven answers instantaneously.
• Slashed costs Handling routine tasks like fitting together data sources or converting data into a usable format call for large time investments from costly data experts, which naturally comes with a high price tag. Thin on the ground and extremely expensive, data science talents should be freed up for higher value activities like modeling data marts or creating predictive models.

Self-service BI solutions thus open the door to optimal allocation of human resources and significant cost savings, while also preventing overburdened data scientists from burning out.

• Increased efficiency Independence from data science teams allows business users to generate insights way more efficiently. The thing is, poor alignment between data analysts and business users which is not uncommon may result in producing irrelevant insights that don’t meet the expectations of the latter. To that end, after getting things straight, data analysts have to start the whole analytics process anew, which only hampers timely decision-making. That way, performing search queries on behalf of non-tech business users might require their direct involvement. This is counterproductive as well, since instead of focusing on what they do best, business decision-makers have to waste their precious time trying to get on the same page with data scientists. This is where self-service BI comes in.

Self-service BI use cases

To gain a better understanding of how our AI-assisted BI solutions can help and what practical value they bring, watch our 2-minute video. The video shows how our BI solution helped one of the world’s largest retailers drive efficiency gains and open up new market opportunities.

Originally published at https://itrexgroup.com on August 26, 2020.