The story of mankind has been technological effect outpacing the ability of human institutions to adapt quickly enough.
We are well on the way to a world in which almost all aspects of our lives will depend on AI systems, yet we are faced with many myths and challenges that prevent us from adapting them quickly.
Usually one of the challenges faced is to distinguish the complicated terms and jargons thrown by the tech industry.
In our team and client interactions one term that is used as a convenient replacement over the other is BI (Business Intelligence) and AI (Artificial Intelligence)
Directly to the point, BI is a technology driven process that is used to analyse data and present actionable insights relevant to achieving business objectives.
AI on the other hand is bit amorphous. It involves advanced computation to make computers think like we humans do. Its therefore a complete collection of data, algorithms and super computing power that is required to achieve its purpose of discovering new data and hidden patterns.
A typical Analytics Business value model recommended by Gartner is shown below.
Every organization needs to structure its stage of descriptive analytics well enough before being able to take the full advantage of the more advanced stages.
“Descriptive analytics” is considered as BI, which is the hindsight, helps us look at what has happened in the past using a combination of reports and dashboards.
On the other hand, AI can understand macro and micro data trends and point out why it happened (diagnostic analytics). Once data patterns are identified we can forecast the same outcome for the future (Predictive analytics) and also provide business recommendations and solutions that help them stay profitable (aptly named as Prescriptive Analytics).
So, AI is not BI.
On a semantic tree AI is a branch of data science and BI is a sub branch of AI.
So, when organisations say that they are using Analytics, mostly they are referring to the BI practices alone. AI implementation is the next series of logical steps and definitely of more Business value.
Hence, businesses have to begin working on the lower branch i.e. BI by firstly enabling a culture of data driven business reporting and performance dashboards to gradually climb up the tree and utilise AI to its maximum potential.
Satish Menon, Learner-Implementer-Guide-Learner
Heads the Analytics Practice at Bazaar 24×7
