Harnessing the Power of Generative AI to Create Insights and Augment Decisions

This article is sponsored by Tableau

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Introduction

The recent hype surrounding Generative AI has been inescapable amidst the release of content-creating tools such as ChatGPT, Bard, and Midjourney. Countless commentators have speculated on its promise and potential, leaving CEOs wondering if this is more tech hype or a truly game-changing opportunity for their businesses.

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What is Generative AI?

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can create new data or content, such as text, images, or music, based on the data it has been trained on. For example, Generative AI can write a product description, design a logo, create new product ideas based on customer feedback, and generate personalized content, reports, or recommendations for business customers based on their preferences and behavior.

What does this mean for businesses?

80% of senior IT leaders [1] believe Generative AI will help their organization make better use of data — which business leaders agree is critical for business decision-making [2]. However, 41% say they can’t understand their data because it is too complex or inaccessible.?

Salesforce now offers a solution to this problem. It recently released Tableau GPT to leverage the advanced capabilities of Generative AI to simplify and democratize the process of data analysis, which is designed to help make data accessible to?everyone?in the business, regardless of their familiarity with data.

For data analysts, Tableau GPT automates data analysis, preparation, and governance, providing users with helpful guidance and contextual instructions within the product. Tableau GPT simplifies and streamlines existing analyst workflows, lowering the technical barrier to entry and reducing repetitive tasks.?

For analytics consumers, the focus is to deliver distilled, meaningful insights from all their data for every decision. Tableau GPT helps provide insights in plain language and even proactively surfaces the questions the user might ask next.?

Business users no longer need a degree in computer science or machine learning to interact or derive value from data.?Instead, everyone can now use natural language to ask questions and get data insights. Tableau GPT's conversational analytics interface predicts users' questions and provides essential insights that empower them to make informed decisions quickly and efficiently. Thanks to the tool's inclusive design, even users who are not expert data analysts can now access insights extrapolated from data.

Tableau Pulse takes Tableau GPT one step further. It is a reimagined data experience for analytics consumers that will empower every employee with smart, personalized, and contextual insights delivered directly into their flow of work. It transforms how people engage with their data in ways that are more meaningful, helping everyone in an organization become data-driven. This will especially help users who don’t have time to learn new tools, need data at their fingertips to make decisions quickly, and want to go beyond the “how” and “what” of data to understand the “why.”

Today, the amount of data businesses contend with can be overwhelming, and reports are often presented in a one-size-fits-all way to serve entire teams at once. ?Tableau Pulse changes this by providing data digests in the flow of work and an intuitive, personalized metrics homepage that can be tailored to your needs.

Gone are the days of filtering five different ways in a dashboard to find the numbers you care about. Now, you can have a simple, curated, ‘newsfeed’-like experience of key KPIs that you personally select. Over time, this experience will return more personalized results as Tableau Pulse learns what insights you care most about [3].?For example, as you see below, appliance sales are seeing an unusual spike.

Figure 1: Tableau Pulse Surfaces Insights in Natural Language (Source Tableau.com [4])

Should you wish to delve deeper and understand why this is happening, you are now able to do so.?Not only does Tableau GPT deliver insights in plain language, graphs, and charts, but it even suggests questions you may not have thought of asking (see below).

Figure 2: Tableau Pulse Suggests Questions (Source Tableau.com [5])

Today, making sense of data can be a time-consuming and manual process. Users might spend hours analyzing data to identify trends and insights, and it can be hard to know what questions to ask of your data. All of this slows down decision-making. As can be seen below, Tableau Pulse enables smarter use of data by helping organizations automate analysis and communicate insights in easy-to-understand ways—that is, using natural language.

Figure 3: Tableau Pulse Automates Data Analysis and Communicates Insights (Source Tableau.com [6])

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This technology offers businesses two significant benefits:

●???????Firstly, everyone in the business is empowered with the ability to make data-driven decisions.

●???????And secondly, data professionals are now free to work on more complex and profitable data analysis programs.

When organizations make better decisions, they can gain an average 8% [7] uplift in profitability, an average 6% uplift in shareholder returns [8], and a 10% [9] reduction in operating costs [10], making the contextual provision of data insights accessible to everyone a business imperative.

Are there risks to businesses that use Generative AI?

While there is significant hype surrounding Generative AI and its ability to transform businesses, it is essential to acknowledge its limitations.?There are no doubt countless benefits in terms of the generation of novel ideas or business insights, but there are also drawbacks that must be considered. For example, the inability of Generative AI to apply common sense to real-world content often results in inaccurate or nonsensical responses.?This undermines its ability to provide meaningful outputs and limits its potential effectiveness. Yet, this limitation can easily be overcome by putting a human in the loop to add a layer of business context, data validation, and insight verification [11].

In addition, the complex mathematics behind Generative AI can make it difficult to explain, thus hampering its transparency and accountability. Yes, this limitation can also be overcome by providing a human-readable explanation of a decision-making process.??So, by recognizing and addressing Generative AI’s limitations, and putting proper guardrails in place, businesses can effectively harness its power while navigating its risks.

Tableau's vision for a data-driven world

The need for people to see and understand data has never been greater or more relevant than today. Today, thanks to Generative AI, the analytics age we find ourselves in is unique [12].?It has the potential to be one of the most transformative, game-changing [13] technologies of our lifetime.?

Twenty years ago, Tableau transformed analytics by reimagining how millions of people could easily see and understand data. With Tableau GPT and Tableau Pulse, they are likely to transform the industry yet again with a brand new experience that will empower?everyone?to become truly data-driven in this new era of data analytics [14].?

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Sources:

[1] https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/generative-ai-research/

[2] https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/data-skills-research/

[3] https://www.tableau.com/blog/tableau-pulse-and-tableau-gpt

[4] https://www.tableau.com/blog/tableau-pulse-and-tableau-gpt

[5] https://www.tableau.com/blog/tableau-pulse-and-tableau-gpt

[6] https://www.tableau.com/blog/tableau-pulse-and-tableau-gpt

[7] https://bi-survey.com/big-data-benefits

[8] https://hbr.org/2010/06/the-decision-driven-organization

[9] The Journey to Becoming Data-Driven: A Progress Report on the State of Corporate Data Initiatives. New Vantage Partners LLC, 2021. - NewVantage Partners Big Data and AI Executive Survey 2019 (filesusr.com)

[10] https://bi-survey.com/big-data-benefits

[11] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2023/05/09/ai-first-companies-salesforce-launches-gpt-for-data-insights-teases-something-much-bigger

[12] https://www.tableau.com/blog/tableau-pulse-and-tableau-gpt

[13] https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/generative-ai-research

[14] https://www.tableau.com/blog/tableau-pulse-and-tableau-gpt

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