BI and Machine Learning, the perfect duo for your business reports

Business Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence, especially via machine learning, are two technologies that complement each other 100%, and whose interaction provides numerous benefits to companies:

• Greater ease of use of BI tools
• Clearer view of business opportunities
• Automation in generating relevant reports for the company and for their subsequent analysis
• Increase in user productivity
• Increase in the success rate of the decisions made

In this article we are going to look at some of the ways that Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have reached the world of Business Intelligence to transform it, as well as how to revolutionise the way of making business decisions and acting accordingly.

One of the first reflections of the positive influence of Machine Learning on Business Intelligence is the optimisation of the process of obtaining information that is going to subjected to analysis. Previously, companies’ data experts spent a lot of time selecting in the data origins the information they would exploit later in the Business Intelligence tool. Currently, tools such as Google BigQuery (available on Google Cloud Platform) provide functions that automate the search for information in repositories, in accordance with previous patterns of activity. This Datawarehouse tool stands out against its competitors thanks to its speed in the processing of data, in addition to a pay-per-use payment method which is very attractive for companies.

Business Intelligence Reports: dynamic, reliable and always up-to-date

As regards the BI tools (such as Tableau or Looker, for example), thanks to the aforementioned advances, users can search data to build their dynamic reports, expand or validate information or a suggestion generated by the machine.

And it doesn’t stop there. Increasingly and, in accordance with machine learning, Business Intelligence software is going to:

• Recommend how to approach and solve business problems
• Execute simulations to optimise processes
• Create new performance objectives based on predictions
• Make decisions automatically (for example, in detecting fraud or in e-commerce contexts)

In the case of the business reports offered by BI tools, machine learning provides new and interesting possibilities. The following stand out:

• Automatic generation of charts Current business intelligence tools display or suggest a specific type of chart depending on the data they are handling for a report. Thanks to machine learning technology, these BI solutions find out the user’s preferences by relating the charts and types of data, and suggest them based on priority.
• Automatic creation of dashboards. From a set of data (generally an Excel file), a BI solution automatically creates a data model with metrics, dimensions and hierarchies. It then generates the appropriate charts and displays them on the dashboard. When users indicate a key metric, this process is much simpler.
• Generation of natural language. A growing number of BI programmes have natural language plug-ins to automate the creation of text that explains the most important findings on the charts or dashboards. When users interact with this text to examine it, it changes dynamically.
• Related reports and perspectives. Within a report, dashboard or container, Business Intelligence solutions can display links to related reports and charts generated dynamically thanks to machine learning models and rules.
• Integration of chatbots. Users can interact with a chatbot or assistants to check and receive both written and oral information. The response times of these assistants is significantly reduced thanks to the fact that Machine Learning recognises the most common query patterns and responses that users are most satisfied with.
• Personalisation of portals. A current business intelligence solution relies on machine learning to understand the preferences of users and offer them a portal with the reports and feeds that best suit their needs. 

Benefits of Machine Learning in Business Intelligence reports 

Machine learning technologies enable companies from any sector to make decisions with minimum risk, which helps the profitability of the business. Some of the main ways of offering these benefits are:

• Agile decision-making in an ever changing current environment, in which information is protean in nature (in other words, it changes constantly), practically to the minute. It is an extremely important characteristic in environments like electronic commerce companies or companies that work with recommendations.
• Location of the key performance indicators (KPIs) Machine Learning helps all of the members of a board of directors have the same definition and data for these indicators, based on similar previous experiences.
• Proactive business intelligence systems. Machine learning systems are going to suggest decisions to managers based on similar situations from the past. This way, it is going to be possible to define notifications, exceptions and predictive algorithms.
• Optimisation of data discovery and self-service for business analysts. Thanks to Machine Learning, business data experts without a technical profile have tools that help them to locate data much more easily and quickly and analyse it in depth.
• Understandable reports that can be broken down. The application of machine learning technology allows managers to have clear, comprehensive and understandable reports and with a high level of detail. Reports on Excel spreadsheets are a thing of the past, with their endless charts and dozens of metrics, which make it impossible to make a decision or draw a conclusion.
• Recommendation of products. Thanks to Machine learning and predictive analysis, it is possible to find patterns and trends in the demands of customers. It is cross-selling on a large scale, which offers specific products and contents that facilitate conversion.
• Dynamic prices. When integrated into a Business Intelligence solution, machine learning technology makes dynamic pricing models work. This technology relies on data to improve pricing and the flow of income in accordance with the information about the customer and the fluctuations in demand, predicting the potential increases in demand in advance.

At Intelligence Partner we have amassed a wealth of knowledge and experience in Business Intelligence and Machine Learning. We make all of this expertise available to help you to automate processes for analytical reporting with tools from the Google Cloud Platform environment (such as BigQuery, Tableau or Looker), a fundamental element for the success of your business.

You just need to explain to us how you currently manage the data from your company and what objectives you want to achieve with a Business Intelligence solution. We will study your case and suggest the best solution for your requirements, also showing you the added value that Machine Learning technology will give to you in analysing your information.

Shall we start?