By Mr Anurag Sanghai
With the increasing adoption of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), different use cases have indicated a need for solutions that offer varying levels of human intervention. Two applications – agents and copilots – have emerged as possible alternatives for organizations and the choice is determined by desired balance between automation and human involvement. While agents can be calibrated to execute tasks and make decisions with minimal human input, copilots are designed to merge technology and human inputs for a symbiotic collaboration. Agents are suited to low deviance use cases, in situations where decisions are primarily binary, while copilots are programmed to work alongside humans.
In analytics, copilots play a significant role in data democratization by making analytics accessible to everyone, including non-technical audiences. Functional users, such as human data analysts, work with copilots to create an open environment for collaborative data exploration. Manual and repetitive tasks can be delegated to these systems, freeing up the functional user to focus on the productive endeavors of data interpretation and higher value analytical tasks.
Business Impact of GenAI-driven copilots
GenAI-driven copilots offer a considerable improvement in data-driven decisions. Let’s look at how they help enterprises with:
Data Preparation and Visualization: Different sources can deliver business data in different formats. In addition to the usual extracting, cleaning, normalization and transformation of data, GenAI-driven copilots go a step further not only to analyze the data but also to automatically generate visualizations like charts, graphs, maps, etc.
Facilitating Data Access and Analysis: Business users have been forever dependent on their IT departments for running data queries. With Gen AI, non-technical users can work independently to explore and analyze data. The resulting democratization of data access leads to a well-informed workforce and increased participation in business strategy. Business teams can also use AI copilots for monitoring data for anomalies and patterns continuously, which can deliver great value through proactive, real-time problem identification and effective risk management.
Data Exploration: Talking through Gen AI is like asking a colleague to show the trend in sales for the quarter, broken into product categories and storefronts. The user can type it just the way they would say it and receive an interactive visualization almost instantly. The system eliminates a business user’s dependency on technical teams by comprehending user queries and responding to them in business language using its natural language querying (NLQ) capabilities.
Emerging trends in GenAI-driven copilots for BI
The promising performance of AI copilots has triggered a positive market response, accelerating the development in AI copilots. The application of GenAI for business intelligence (BI) is driven by three trends, which are:
Adaptive Decision Support & Instant Insights
In global and dynamic business environments, there is a constant influx of new information which needs to be processed for real-time analysis and decision support . Such agility is essential for the company to respond to evolving business horizons and stay ahead of the competition.
Based on evolving data streams, GenAI can offer adaptive decision support for tailored recommendations. AI-driven systems continuously recalibrate insights in response to changing contexts, so that the most relevant and up-to-date information is always available. This agility is particularly crucial in industries where market conditions, customer preferences and other variables fluctuate rapidly.
Increased Trust & Transparency
Decision-makers need to be aware of the business logic and parameters taken into consideration by GenAI copilots when making recommendations. In a high-stakes environment, executives don’t always trust anything blindly without being absolutely sure of every minute detail. Humans the reasoning they use to arrive at certain conclusions; GenAI is no different.
Copilots can explain their method, like a mathematician explaining their solution, so that users can confirm the validity of the results and inferences. This capability increases the organization’s trust in copilots and paves the way for its application in BI. In a business use case where AI-generated business reports recommend a strategic pivot in market focus, decision-makers can turn to Generative Explainable AI (XAI) for an in-depth understanding of how the system arrived at that conclusion. XAI can break down the intricacies of the algorithm and showcases the relevant data points that influence the outcome.
Personalized Insights
GenAI hold the promise of moving away from a standard approach that treats all users the same. It can offer comprehensive personalization by learning how each user interacts with data. It focuses on the unique needs of each individual so that the data exploration and decision-making experience is much more immersive.
GenAI-driven copilots analyze user behavior, preferences and past interactions to understand what specific insights, types of visualizations and reporting styles they prefer. Based on this, GenAI presents changes in processes like report frequency, information depth and inclusion of relevant key performance indicators.
To sum up, GenAI-driven copilots integrate with BI and analytics to transform business data from a static resource into a dynamic partner. This evolution goes far beyond the mere advancement of technology. It represents a significant paradigm shift as data becomes a pathway to progress, helping enterprises feel confident about their strategic decisions.
(The author of the article is Mr Anurag Sanghai, Principal Solutions Architect, Intellicus Technologies , and the views expressed in this article are his own)
