Insights, unleashed: Generative AI’s role in transforming business intelligence

Earlier this year, off the back of the 2024 Data and AI Trends Report, I wrote about generative AI’s (genAI) game-changing potential to speed the delivery of insights across organisations. In the months since, a lot has changed. AI agents are popping up everywhere—on our phones, in our workplace tools, on our social media channels, and more. Fueled by this ubiquity, the delivery of insights will soon hit warp speed.

Let’s take a look at how we’ve reached this tipping point, not just with AI but in the business intelligence (BI) domain as well, and what organisations can do to embrace its full potential.

The exponential evolution of BI

We’ve come a long way from the early days of BI, when readily available reports and dashboards were considered cutting-edge. As these early solutions evolved, users gained the ability to query data using a browse mechanism and data visualisations.?

Today, with platforms like Looker, gen AI is being infused into BI capabilities. Thanks to genAI’s ability to understand human language, it’s far easier for users and data analysts to interact with data and get helpful answers. But it goes beyond just answering questions. Now, BI platforms with genAI capabilities can perform their own analysis of the results—serving up fresh insights that the analyst or business executive didn’t even think to ask for.

It’s like genAI is finally unleashing the full potential of BI. Just as my colleague Gerrit Kazmaier wrote about the flywheel of data and AI, it’s like a new flywheel has arrived. Together, genAI and BI are making magic—prompting the prompts, digging into the data, predicting the predictive modelling. And it all helps business leaders to understand more, forecast more, and move forward faster.

From dashboard drudgery to innovation

Generative AI’s entry into the BI space empowers organisations to focus on what’s important. Instead of spending the majority of time creating dashboards, that time can be spent brainstorming with AI and thinking about ways to grow your business. New questions come to the fore, like, ‘How can we use genAI to uncover hidden patterns and insights in our data that we might have otherwise missed?’

Indeed, questions like these are driving new ideas amongst the second season of AI Trailblazers here in Singapore. We’re seeing some organisations do hackathons not only to innovate on new genAI use cases, but on insights based on the data they have in a certain area.?

While early use cases focused on chatbots and summarization, organisations are now going further—integrating genAI with core systems like SAP. For example, they’re using Google’s Gemini to automate invoice matching by intelligently reconciling discrepancies between supplier invoices and purchase orders, even when product names differ slightly.

These latest innovations and the exploration of insights point to an incredibly exciting future. First, though, a few things need to happen.

Getting to the ‘aha’ moment with AI

To tap into AI’s potential, you need to build awareness of that potential across all areas of the business. And it all starts with education. By showing employees what’s possible, you’re paving the way for new ideas and innovations to emerge.

I experienced the value of education first hand in my work with Tsao Foundation, a non-profit that exists to improve the quality of life for older people. Doctors, nurses, and caregivers play a key role in helping the Foundation realise its goals, and I suspected that genAI could play a supporting role in the work they do. Yet they had little experience with the technology—and this meant untapped potential for personal productivity.

So what we did was hold a half-day Gemini workshop to help doctors, nurses, and caretakers learn how to use genAI, both in their personal lives and at work. We showed them how to use it in different scenarios, we taught them how to prompt, and we then workshopped all the different results. As they started to think about ways to use the technology in cross-functional domains, some pretty incredible ‘aha’ moments arose.

The lesson here? Just because there’s a lot of hype out there about genAI, don’t assume that your teams will know how to get the most from it. Start at the lowest common denominator and bring everyone on a journey of discovery. This way, all your employees will soon grasp just how impactful it can be.

At the same time, it’s important to tackle perceived complexities around getting started. Some organisations still put AI in the ‘too hard’ basket, confused about what to do first or which vendors to choose. When a technology moves as fast as AI, this is not surprising. But, fortunately, companies like Google Cloud are making it easier than ever for organisations to get started—particularly with its platform, models (choice of open and closed), and solutions. What’s more, Google is also integrating genAI capabilities across all of its product suite, giving every company the capability to quickly and easily do more with gen AI—for example, in the area of cybersecurity with Chronicle and BI with Looker.?

2025 will be the year of unparalleled insight

In 2025, I believe one of the big trends in the data and AI space will be that AI will help reshape insights. GenAI will accelerate the potential of AI in BI, helping businesses uncover previously unimaginable opportunities for growth. In this near future, insights are not just extracted, but co-created. GenAI partners with humans, allowing us to move beyond simply uncovering insights to focusing on strategic action and decision-making. BI becomes an intelligent data assistant, proactively surfacing relevant information, maybe even answering your questions before you ask them, and guiding you towards impactful discoveries.

The net result? Businesses will soon be able to achieve radically new things with their data, leveraging BI platforms not only to analyse their own data but to create entirely new data products and services for monetisation.?

For a recap of the five big trends in the 2024 Data and AI Trends Report, get the full report here.