From information to impact – The rise of autonomous analytics

Traditional BI and AutoML platforms enable self-service access to mountains of high-fidelity data, but they fail to deliver actionable insights to drive better business outcomes.

Enter autonomous analytics, such as Aible, which can surface anomalous KPIs and trends and the key drivers as actionable insights. They complement popular BI tools to guide analysts to swift, precise insights. For decades, firms have struggled to make BI work to drive business outcomes. Today, end users have access to more data than ever before but not the actionable insights necessary to help steer the business to the best possible outcomes. As Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize and Turing Award winner, noted back in 1971, “Wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. “In 2013, Clayton Christensen (of Innovator’s Dilemma fame) et al. wrote in the Harvard Business Review article “Consulting on the Cusp of Disruption” that, “The big data company BeyondCore can automatically evaluate vast amounts of data, identify statistically relevant insights, and present them through an animated briefing, rendering the junior analyst role obsolete. “BeyondCore eventually became Salesforce Einstein Discovery and inspired the modern augmented analytics wave. The team behind BeyondCore has now started Aible, which takes autonomous analytics to the next level by marrying it with generative AI.

GENERATIVE AI-POWERED INSIGHTS DRAMATICALLY FASTER, WITH MINIMAL COST

Aible’s patented technology automatically explores millions of cuts of data in minutes, at a fraction of the cost of legacy of industries have published case studies showing the scalability, cost-efficiency, and speed of the Aible platform. A Google blog post entitled Aible’s serverless journey to challenge the cost vs. performance paradigm explains how Aible delivered such analytics efficiencies on BigQuery, but such efficiencies can be expected on any platform.

As an illustration of this capability, consider data for an outbound call-center that makes calls to offer co-branded credit cards to prospects. Aible enables autonomous analytics to use transaction data, enriched with raw operational data such as agent attributes like education, experience, call quality, and scores, to understand how and to precisely what extent they drive KPIs like conversion rates and offer a focused view into what can be done to address opportunities for improvement.

For example, it is helpful to combine agent attributes in the credit card call center illustration above into agent segments that can be used as engineered features in the analysis to better understand the precise extent to which cohorts drive outcomes. Aible automatically generates and evaluates such cohorts to determine the “net effect” of each combination on the KPI of interest. The most significant drivers of the tracked KPIs are reflected in a circular Sankey visualization, which shows the net effects of all variables at a glance. Alternatively, for business users, Aible can auto-generate traditional dashboards with the key charts organized in order of their impact on the KPI.

AUGMENT BI PLATFORMS

Autonomous analytics platforms can work in standalone mode but work best as complements to popular BI platforms. Aible automatically evaluates raw and engineered data, determines key insights, and auto-generates the KPI driver view. It can even export native BI tool dashboards, to be embedded into yet other BI tools such as Tableau and Power BI. In this design, we retain all the capabilities of the BI platform, with Aible’s analytics engine helping us find the key statistically-sound insights behind the scenes. This also suggests a new way for working for analysts and business leaders. The BI platform should be configured to monitor KPIs and alert analysts and/or business leaders about key insights related to the KPIs with additional information on which of the patterns surfaced are credible. The analysts can use these reports as starting points to pull further data. When used in this manner, the Aible engine can be thought of as driving BI for enterprise performance analytics. The BI platform should also be leveraged when analysts are looking to get reports in broader contexts than understanding KPI drivers.

“AUTONOMOUS ANALYTICS PLATFORMS CAN WORK IN STANDALONE MODE BUT WORK BEST AS COMPLEMENTS TO POPULAR BI PLATFORMS.”

DATA GRANULARITY IS ESSENTIAL

To get the most out of autonomous analytics platforms, the transaction data must be at the most granular level possible and then tagged with all raw and engineered attributes, such as from interaction and segmentation analysis, that make sense for that level. The autonomous analytics system can also auto-generate engineered features. Aible uses this data to generate key insights from the data and enable users to ask business questions such as “How can I improve sales to Gen Z customers?” instead of just analytical questions that must be translatable to SQL.

The engine will monitor KPIs, identify significant trends and shifts in the KPIs, and highlight statistically credible alerts. It also generates visuals to explain the single or multi-variate patterns in a matter suited to the user persona – from circular Sankey charts and mind maps for expert analysts, to dynamic dashboards and generative AI storytelling for business users.

The Aible AI engine provides a list of drivers in a circular Sankey chart, with any overlap clearly indicated. The same view also provides ordered lists of drivers and corresponding charts showing the exact impact of each on tracked KPIs. In addition to this, the AI engine also provides a view into the behavior shift and population shift for each driver for period-to-period results, where the rate effect reflects change attributable to the average change in the value of a cohort, whereas the mix effect reflects the change in the proportion of that cohort.

Aible includes a generative AI platform that uses foundation models such as PaLM 2 and GPT-4 to allow users to ask the Aible engine questions about the drivers and their precise extent of impact behind KPIs in plain English; these generate a well-articulated response, also in plain English. Such a system gives everyone at firms the power to interrogate the engine about business questions related to the KPI and the drivers behind KPIs or KPI changes.

A properly implemented platform can provide insights into which customer segments and/or employee segments are driving observed KPIs as applicable. Aible provides the necessary guardrails for enterprises to securely scale insights from generative AI responses with its ability to automatically doublecheck the output to reduce hallucinations (where generative AI creates inaccurate facts).

Aible can deliver insights in near real-time, allowing firms to respond to market threats and opportunities much faster, and in a very surgical fashion to optimize outcomes.

INNOVATION TAKEAWAYS

AI FIRST

An AI first approach automatically analyzes raw data across millions of variable combinates – group-by and drill-down charts– in a matter of minutes and costing cents.

THE ART OF STORY TELLING

Generative storytelling automatically highlights key insights in the data while double-checking the generative AI for hallucinations.

HAVE IT YOUR WAY

Insights can be consumed in multiple ways, from conversational interfaces to dashboards and mind maps.

Interesting read?

Capgemini’s Innovation publication,Data-powered Innovation Review | Wave 7 features 16 such fascinating articles, crafted by leading experts from Capgemini, and partners like Aible, the Green Software Foundation,and Fivetran. Discover groundbreaking advancements in data-powered innovation, explore the broader applications of AI beyond language models, and learn how data and AI can contribute to creating a more sustainable planet and society. Find all previous Waves here.