Solving the Problem of Data and Decision Making

Knowledge is power, especially when it comes to making daily business decisions that directly impact productivity, waste, compliance, growth and profitability. However, the ability to proactively leverage that knowledge in an enterprise is directly proportional to the availability and processing of the right data at the right time in the right format to the right businessperson.

Tapping into the power of data has historically been the responsibility of highly specialized teams of data scientists and data analysts. Unfortunately, this puts the immediate needs of business leaders behind the prioritization and time required to mobilize these resources to specific projects. With the rise in availability and popularity of new artificial intelligence solutions, it is no surprise that understanding where these new technologies will have actual applicability and when comes in question.

The problem of data and decision making

It is no exaggeration to say that everyone today is drowning in data. Unfortunately, making data useful to leaders requires highly specialized tools and specialists. For example, data engineers and data scientists have impressive coding and other technical skills that enable them to process large volumes of data. However, there is a vast chasm between technical skills and meeting business requirements. Given most data scientists have come up through the academic ranks, it becomes a game of 20 questions for business leaders to tease out their daily realities from the complexities of the generated reports and dashboards.

As you can imagine, the game of 20 questions played by business leaders and specialists takes too long and is extremely error prone. It is simply too hard to tease out useful business insights from data science output and even most reports and dashboards designed for business users. This gives rise to a crisis of expectation for the time lag between business leaders needing to make daily decisions dependent on ready access to the right information in the right format and the amount of effort, resources and mind reading required by the data analytics teams to generate the requested results.

Bridging the gap between business leaders and technology

Most organization rely on their Business Intelligence (BI) tools to bridge the gap between data and knowledge. BI grew out of the need to manage the business across functional areas served by specific applications and requires separate data stores, data management, roll-up of dimensions and metrics to generate interactive reports and dashboards.

The problem is that business demands are dynamic. BI solutions have not grown to adapt elegantly to these demands or provide a means to innovate rapidly. At the end of the day, BI has provided historical pictures and plots that require a businessperson to interpret, analyze further, and determine what action to take. Much of the value is created by the individual interpreting the results versus the technology itself.

This is where AI and generative AI (GenAI) has stepped in to save the day. To leverage AI to have the data-to-decision problem solved for your business, you need to embrace several data shaping techniques and the ability to interpret what constitutes demand or your product (for example: Closeout sales that are deeply discounted at the end of a season are not demand, it is the result of getting demand wrong and reduces profitability of a product category as well as consumes critical working capital throughout the year).

The best tool for such thinking and automation is Reinforcement Learning that has been proven with applications such as autonomous driving vehicles, beating the best chess master and outperforming the best gamer on any video game.

Driving actionable insights and automation

UBIX understands that AI success is at the intersection of data access, no-code GenAI with reinforcement learning, and human-centric queries to understand past, present and future states. We can help you solve complex problems in both a generative and bespoke way to accelerate your business and we have also talked about how BI has fallen short on the ability to drive action and automation within your business.

These are very important points because the real promise of AI is not just in its ability to solve problems that it has been trained on as well as report on the results of those use cases, it’s extremely important for it to know how to recommend and adapt the outcomes to achieve goals. This is where reinforcement learning can be taught to play the game of business for you where it always understands the observed state of the business and the actions to take that optimize the outcome for its reward.

Learning how GenAI and emerging advancements like Reinforcement Learning can deliver on the promise of bridging the gap between data and decision making has never been easier. Download our free eBook titled “Solving the Problem
of Data and Decision Making” to help better understand the nuances of emerging AI concepts and technologies and offer a set of best practices for consideration to ensure digital transformation and business-led AI success. Or if you can spare 22 minutes for a mini–AI Readiness Workshop, you can contact one of our AI experts today.