Why AI-powered analytics should be front and center for businesses
Entrepreneurship is a lot like sports. You build the best team possible and put them on the playing field with what you hope is a winning strategy. But, as Sir Alex Ferguson once said, ‘Part of the pursuit of excellence involves eliminating as many surprises as possible, because life is full of the unexpected.’ The point is that things change and sometimes you have to adjust your strategy to win.
In recent years, adapting to an endless stream of challenges and crises has been the norm, not the exception, for businesses. But adapting to the new reality and taking control of new opportunities is only becoming more important, and every now and then it is important for companies to reflect on, assess and improve the way they adapt to change.
In sports, this adjustment may involve tactical changes or substitutions. Business is all about making informed decisions based on available data. And now that most companies are guided by technology, the amount of data in the world is growing exponentially. In 2013, approximately 4.4 zettabytes of data were stored worldwide, but some estimates show that this will rise to a staggering 181 zettabytes of data by 2025.
This immense and ever-growing mountain of data poses a significant hurdle for companies striving for business agility. How can you remain flexible in your business operations and decision-making without gaining control over that data?
Director and solutions architect at OpenText.
The rise of big data and AI-powered analytics are coming to the fore
Data proliferation shows no signs of slowing, highlighting the need for companies to proactively adapt their approach to data storage, protection and use. Crucially, the way companies enable their employees to access and gain insights from massive data sets must become more seamless. It is virtually impossible to manually process and assess such vast amounts of information, so automated analytics will become essential to unlocking the value of data in the future.
Analytics is not new – far from it. But the tools of the very recent past did not have the kind of scalability required today. New volume levels and new types of data are created at breathtaking speed. So if companies want to stay competitive, they need tools that have inherent elasticity and growth built into them.
It is important to shed light on the different types of analytics tools that can make data analysis ready, such as descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive methods. AI-powered analytics tools in particular are having a moment right now and are sure to get faster, smarter, and more accurate as their training datasets grow. But these types of analysis tools are no longer just a consideration for the future.
Take the manufacturing industry, for example. AI has combined with analytics to enable manufacturing companies to get a 360-degree view of all their data, whether structured or unstructured, historical or real-time. This is then synthesized into actionable insights to support the delivery of advanced manufacturing processes such as smart factories, digital twins and autonomous supply chains.
Manufacturing companies can use these tactics to avoid having their plans derailed by the proverbial punch in the mouth. Digital twins can be used to simulate different scenarios and companies can adjust their plans based on the outcome of any number of simulations without having to wait for something to go wrong.
And there’s no reason why other sectors can’t also reap the benefits. AI-powered analytics can be used to optimize risk management in finance or personalize customer offerings in retail, to name just two of countless use cases. As we move into the world of big data, powerful analytics will emerge at scale, across the spectrum of business.
Putting agility at the center of the business strategy
These are all important discussion points that should remain on the agenda of companies. AI-powered analytics should be a central part of any company’s broader agility strategy and deployed with the aim of putting the business on a future-proof foundation.
Leveraging AI-powered analytics to deliver actionable insights exactly when they are needed may not help us predict the future precisely, but it is critical to long-term success as data grows in volume and type keep exploding.
Just as sports teams or individuals must adapt during the game and choose when to attack or when to strengthen the defense, companies must be tactically agile. The most famous managers and players in any sport seem to have an almost godlike ability to succeed, but in reality they only make decisions during the playing phase, based on informed tactical analysis and experience. That analysis and the ability to adapt to changing circumstances are the basis of their success.
Companies must become agile in the same way or they will be left behind. Whether it’s securing data from cyber attacks or improving customer experiences, flexibility is at the core of all business priorities. Now is the right time for us to make a tangible change in the way we approach the future – and AI-powered analytics will be at the heart of that.
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