Revolutionizing Business Intelligence (BI): Instant Insights with GenAI By Sagar Mahurkar, Vice President, Findability Sciences

Slash BI wait times from 4 weeks to seconds. Dive into how a GenAI-powered interface brings real-time data extraction, analytics, and forecasting to your fingertips.

Introduction and the BI Bottleneck

We are witnessing a paradigm shift in Business Intelligence (BI). Imagine a world where the arduous, weeks-long process of crafting a BI metric becomes a matter of seconds. Where complex SQL queries and dashboards are replaced by simple, conversational interactions. This isn’t a distant dream but a tangible reality brought to life by Generative AI (GenAI) and its integration into BI systems. Here, we delve into this transformation, ushering in an era of real-time data extraction, analytics, and forecasting.

Traditional BI: A Maze of Complexity

Traditional BI systems, even in the most digitally advanced organizations, are akin to navigating a labyrinth. They demand meticulous data stitching from various tables, exhaustive exploratory analysis, and intricate SQL query constructions. This complexity is compounded by the reliance on manual coding and review processes, leading to an average of 4 weeks per BI request across industries, including manufacturing, retail, and healthcare.

The Industry’s Struggle: Sluggishness in a Fast-Paced World

In a world that moves at breakneck speed, these delays in BI processing aren’t just inconvenient; they’re costly. They translate into missed market opportunities and strategic missteps. From my journey of spearheading projects in mixed reality, artificial intelligence, and video platforms, I’ve seen how delayed data access can cascade into customer loss and negative public perception. The need for speed in BI isn’t a luxury; it’s an imperative.

The solution with GenAI: The Game-Changer

My team was inspired to solve these challenges by developing the GenAI-powered conversational BI platform. This cutting-edge solution, crafted atop an advanced language model, empowers users to engage with data through natural, conversational queries. It’s like having a digital data whisperer at your fingertips, bridging the gap between complex data sets and actionable insights. The result? The transformation of BI processes is from a marathon to a sprint as it reduces response times from weeks to seconds!

Figure 1: Sample User Interface

The solution included the following benefits:

1. Easy Connection to Data: A universal adapter that connects smoothly with all databases and business systems, like IBM, Amazon, and SAP. It even works with simple files like Excel spreadsheets.
2. Talk to Your Data: Like chatting with a friend,  a user can ask the system questions in your own words. The interface is designed to be user-friendly, with helpful suggestions and a record of your past questions. The system’s AI is smart enough to understand the context of your questions and can even transform your words into database queries and data analysis, like identifying trends and making predictions. Additionally, users can dive deeper with unlimited follow-up questions.
3. Business and Context understanding: The AI model is fine-tuned using enterprise documents and provides a layer of prompt engineering to answer questions in an enterprise context.

Central to our technological ethos is a Language Model, a beacon of the transformative power of Transformer Architecture and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). It’s an AI that doesn’t just process language—it comprehends, adapts, and communicates with an almost human-like intuition.

The Impact: Case Studies in Efficiency

In the insurance industry, a single project involved querying extensive tables with over 2 million entries each, like new applicants or policy revenues, which typically took two weeks to process and tied up eight analysts. An AI-powered system has transformed this, dramatically reducing the response time while requiring only two analysts for the task.

For a small business marketplace platform with a vast trove of 6.3 million business listings, the challenge was providing investors and owners with quick, intuitive access to data previously buried in complex dashboards. Introducing a conversational AI interface has made data retrieval immediate and straightforward.

In the retail sector, a retailer faced the daunting task of gathering analytics such as impressions and forecasts from multiple data sources, which stretched over four weeks. Now, with an AI-enabled system, they can generate these analytics in just a few minutes, greatly accelerating their ability to make data-driven decisions.

These examples highlight the profound impact that AI has had in transforming business intelligence processes, making them faster, more efficient, and significantly more user-friendly.

My Vision: A Data-Driven Tomorrow

“GenAI in BI redefines speed and ushers in an era of empowerment where every decision is data-informed, instant, and insightful. We’re not just accelerating analytics; we’re crafting a future where data fluency is universal, insights are instantaneous, and every strategic move is effectively measured.” – Sagar Mahurkar.

About the Author

Sagar Mahurkar leads cross-functional areas of emerging technology strategy, consumer delivery, and presales across projects for multiple Fortune 500 companies and governments. He has experience leading Artificial Intelligence, Metaverse, Video, and Edge Compute projects with over 10 million users and USD 6 Billion in revenues.

As an innovator, Sagar has several patents under his belt. He has won IEEE, Okta, and Verizon international awards. IEEE, IET, Trak.in, EnterpriseAI, and Alley have published his work. He’s a member of the IEEE professional honors society and actively participates in defining standards and reviewing papers for international conferences. He has a TEDx Talk on Augmented Reality. His work has been featured in prestigious events like the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the Japanese Business Association (JBA) Conference, the MIT Startup Exchange, and the NASSCOM AI Meet. Sagar has completed an MBA from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne and is passionate about creating a business impact with technology.

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