Ask HN: What BI problems would you like an AI to solve for you?

[cneumann81]

There are many Business Analytics tools out there, most of which need a lot of configuration and technical skills to get to understandable (business) insights. Imagine you had an Artificial Intelligence that would automatically analyse your data. What problems would you like it to solve for you?

[krmmalik]

Great question! I'd actually like to take one step back and would love to see AI assist with the data cleansing. The actual analysis with BI seems to be getting easier and easier already, especially since the bigger players are stepping in and competition is increasing day by day. If you have enough money you can get a tool to slice and dice the data anyway you want. But even if you have a big budget, cleaning up the data is always really hard. The number of people I've spoken to that say the data cleansing is the most nightmare bit tells me this is a huge and lucrative problem begging to be solved.

[edimaudo]

Helping people figure out what insight they are looking for then creating the reports that gets the data.

[cneumann81]

Interesting. Are you saying it should moderate the process between business and the BI team and the automatically create the necessary reports to give business people access to the relevant data?

[edimaudo]

Not really. For instance I work for a retail company. let's say someone wants to find out all the products on a weekend that made over 10000$. This can of info can be generated by the AI which can query that companys database.

[rprameshwor]

I can't seem to understand how AI fits in here.

How is this different from a simple report showing sales greater than 10000$

[krmmalik]

I think the parent poster is suggesting that the user would know what answer they're looking for but would not know how to instruct the BI tool to get the answer they want. So if they could simply tell the AI in natural language for.for example, then the AI could work out on its own what report would be needed and construct it with the variables needed.

Essentially there's a technical step between knowing what report is needed and actually creating it and I think this is where parent is suggesting the AI could help. (?)

[edimaudo]

Exactly or even checking to see if that is the right question being asked.