Boosting Data Literacy and Insights Through Augmented Intelligence

Organizations can collect every iota of data until they are literally drowning in it and never get to the Promised Land where that data translates into business success. That’s because merely collecting data isn’t enough. It must be analyzed and distributed to professionals at all levels of an organization. It is the individuals who have specific expertise over their business areas, but not necessarily data analytics acumen, that can apply data insights to make improvements. The secret to making data work for your organization is to use business intelligence tools such as Qlik Sense that leverage augmented analytics—using machines to enhance human intelligence rather than replace it—to drive data literacy at every level of your organization.

Data Should Extend the Capabilities of Humans

Although there has been plenty of concern and hype regarding machines taking over human tasks, what is truly compelling is how a machine-human partnership can help humans quickly get value from data to solve real problems through automated insights from the machines. Rather than pursue a nebulous objective, industry-optimized augmented intelligence focused on a particular problem is how data can extend the capabilities of humans and produce high performance for an organization. This is also the way to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) throughout enterprises.

Data Visualizations and Management Dashboards Improve Insight

Without the proper tools to effectively glean insights from the data and communicate them to our human-led teams, many organizations waste time, money and opportunity. While a visual representation of the data is important, it’s not enough. To identify what is really important after crunching terabytes of data, visualizations must be accompanied by intelligent narratives to highlight the crux of the insights for business users. This is an area where machines can provide valuable assistance. For example, through a partnership with Narrative Science, the Qlik Sense business intelligence platform can automatically create detailed natural language reports (equivalent in quality to a human written report) from the data to accompany visual representations of the insights for business intelligence purposes. These narratives are easy to read, concise and dynamic based on real-time changes to the data and the user’s action. Augmented intelligence helps break down the communication barriers that exist between humans and the machines that process data to more efficiently put business intelligence to work to solve real business problems.

For heavily regulated industries, humans need to defend and verify machine-driven insights they use as part of their business. It’s not acceptable to blindly accept artificial intelligence advice and machine generated recommendations without having additional underlying understanding of the reasons the machine came to that conclusion. However, with augmented intelligence, humans get this insider perspective.

Augmented Intelligence Drives Success

Many technology leaders, including Dell Technologies and Microsoft, believe augmented intelligence is going to continue to drive transformative change in the near term for companies that invest in solutions to get usable data into the hands of business experts. And, there are several companies already achieving great success in this way.

Companies from all kinds of industries use machine learning to make business decisions and optimize operations.

Advisors at wealth management companies have more information about their clients’ needs. For example, if machines find data from an individual’s social media activity that suggests the client just had a baby, that’s an important life event that could trigger a check-in from the financial advisor.

Heineken, the No. 1 brewer in Europe, uses its human/machine partnership and augmented intelligence to optimize operations at every stage of business from forecasting to eliminating inefficiencies in its supply chain. The enormous amount of data the company collects, including everything from information about shopper behavior in front of shelves to how every bottle or can leaves a store, would be overwhelming without machines parsing and presenting it in a way that the company can use.

In healthcare, AI is augmenting the role of doctors and medics. Take radiologists, for example, where AI algorithms can pre-analyse all X-ray images to ensure any anomalies are detected before the images are passed on to humans who can then make the final diagnosis. The added value in this partnership comes the fact that machines never miss any anomalies, while doctors have an edge over machines in distinguishing between benign growths and accrual cancerous cells.

Similarly, in the energy sector, BP and GE Power collect vast amounts of data from sensors on equipment. When this data gets funnelled to the fingertips of engineers, scientists and other decision-makers through augmented reality, the machine-human partnership allows a perspective that wouldn’t otherwise be possible and therefore drives better decision making.