Why The World Needs The Next-Gen BI

Integrating AI and ML, the third-generation BI tools promise to make the data analysis and insights mining experience even more intuitive and personalized, with the ongoing aim of supporting better decision-making practices

- Elif Tutuk

Mainstream understanding of how critical data is has accelerated massively in the last year. However, this comprehension has raised many business leaders’ expectations for how data should be serving their organization and the outcomes it delivers; in turn, this has exposed the shortcomings of many business intelligence (BI) tools and processes.

Every technology that reaches broad acceptance goes through generational shifts. We’re now coming out of the second generation of BI, and into the third. The former was all about taking data out of the hands of experts and empowering the majority, specifically through the use of self-service access. Employees no longer had to beg at the door of BI teams; thanks to ever-more intuitive tools, they could answer their own questions and, ultimately, make better decisions faster and with a greater rate of success.

The limitations of new tools

Yet the events of 2020 have shown the limitations to this approach. When events are rapidly unfolding, the onus can’t be on employees to constantly be checking the data to see if the situation has changed and how they should respond. A more proactive approach is needed; however, this is an issue unlikely to be fixed by most of the third-generation tools that are starting to appear.