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ACTIAN Data Analytics gen ai

Jul 3 2024

Will AI Take Data Analyst Jobs?

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has sparked a heated debate about the future of jobs across various industries. Data analysts, in particular, find themselves at the heart of this conversation. Will AI render human data analysts obsolete?

Contrary to the doomsayers’ predictions, the future is not bleak for data analysts. In fact, AI will empower data analysts to thrive, enhancing their ability to provide more insightful and impactful business decisions. Let’s explore how AI, and specifically large language models (LLMs), can work in tandem with data analysts to unlock new levels of value in data and analytics.

The Role of Data Analysts: More Than Number Crunching

First, it’s essential to understand that the role of a data analyst extends far beyond mere number crunching. Data analysts are storytellers, translating complex data into actionable insights that all decision makers can easily understand. They possess the critical thinking skills to ask the right questions, interpret results within the context of business objectives, and communicate findings effectively to stakeholders. While AI excels at processing vast amounts of data and identifying patterns, it lacks the nuanced understanding of business context and the ability to interpret data that are essential capabilities unique to human analysts.

AI as an Empowering Tool, Not a Replacement

Automating Routine Tasks

AI can automate many routine and repetitive tasks that occupy a significant portion of a data analyst’s time. Data cleaning, integration, and basic statistical analysis can be streamlined using AI, freeing analysts to focus on more complex and value-added activities. For example, AI-powered tools can quickly identify and correct data inconsistencies, handle missing values, and perform preliminary data exploration. This automation increases efficiency and allows analysts to delve deeper into data interpretation and strategic analysis.

Enhancing Analytical Capabilities

AI and machine learning algorithms can augment the analytical capabilities of data analysts. These technologies can uncover hidden patterns, detect anomalies, and predict future trends with greater accuracy and speed than legacy approaches. Analysts can use these advanced insights as a foundation for their analysis, adding their expertise and business acumen to provide context and relevance. For instance, AI can identify a subtle trend in customer behavior, which an analyst can then explore further to understand underlying causes and implications for marketing strategies.

Democratizing Data Insights

Large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, can democratize access to data insights by enabling non-technical stakeholders to interact with data in natural language. LLMs can interpret complex queries and generate understandable explanations very quickly, making data insights more accessible to everyone within an organization. This capability enhances collaboration between data analysts and business teams, fostering a data-driven culture where decisions are informed by insights derived from both human and AI analysis.

How LLMs Can Be Used in Data and Analytics Processes

Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Data Querying

LLMs can simplify data querying through natural language processing (NLP). Instead of writing complex SQL queries, analysts and business users can ask questions in plain English. For example, a user might ask, “What were our top-selling products last quarter?” and the LLM can translate this query into the necessary database commands and retrieve the relevant data. This capability lowers the barrier to entry for data analysis, making it more accessible and efficient.

Automated Report Generation

LLMs can assist in generating reports by summarizing key insights from data and creating narratives around them. Analysts can use these auto generated reports as a starting point, refining and adding their insights to produce comprehensive and insightful business reports. This collaboration between AI and analysts ensures that reports are both data-rich and contextually relevant.

Enhanced Data Visualization

LLMs can enhance data visualization by interpreting data and providing textual explanations. For instance, when presenting a complex graph or chart, the LLM can generate accompanying text that explains the key takeaways and trends in the data. This feature helps bridge the gap between data visualization and interpretation, making it easier for stakeholders to understand and act on the insights.

The Human Element: Context, Ethics, and Interpretation

Despite the advancements in AI, the human element remains irreplaceable in data analysis. Analysts bring context, ethical considerations, and nuanced interpretation to the table. They understand the business environment, can ask probing questions, and can foresee the potential impact of data-driven decisions on various areas of the business. Moreover, analysts are crucial in ensuring that data usage adheres to ethical standards and regulatory requirements, areas where AI still has limitations.

Contextual Understanding

AI might identify a correlation, but it takes a human analyst to understand whether the correlation is meaningful and relevant to the business. Analysts can discern whether a trend is due to a seasonal pattern, a market anomaly, or a fundamental change in consumer behavior, providing depth to the analysis that AI alone cannot achieve.

Ethical Oversight

AI systems can inadvertently perpetuate biases present in the data they are trained on. Data analysts play a vital role in identifying and mitigating these biases, ensuring that the insights generated are fair and ethical. They can scrutinize AI-generated models and results, applying their judgment to avoid unintended consequences.

Strategic Decision-Making

Ultimately, data analysts are instrumental in strategic decision-making. They can synthesize insights from multiple data sources, apply their industry knowledge, and recommend actionable strategies. This strategic input is crucial for aligning data insights with business goals and driving impactful decisions.

The End Game: A Symbiotic Relationship

The future of data analysis is not a zero-sum game between AI and human analysts. Instead, it is a symbiotic relationship where each complements the other. AI, with its ability to process and analyze data at unprecedented scale, enhances the capabilities of data analysts. Analysts, with their contextual understanding, critical thinking, and ethical oversight, ensure that AI-driven insights are relevant, accurate, and actionable.

By embracing AI as a tool rather than a threat, data analysts can unlock new levels of productivity and insight, driving smarter business decisions and better outcomes. In this collaborative future, data analysts will not only survive but thrive, leveraging AI to amplify their impact and solidify their role as indispensable assets in the data-driven business landscape.

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Your Company is Ready for Gen AI. But is Your Data?

The buzz around Generative AI (Gen AI) is palpable, and for good reason. This powerful technology promises to revolutionize how businesses like yours operate, innovate, and engage with customers. From creating compelling marketing content to developing new product designs, the potential applications of Gen AI are vast and transformative. But here’s the kicker: to unlock these benefits, your data needs to be in tip-top shape. Yes, your company might be ready for Gen AI, but the real question is—are your data and data preparation up to the mark? Let’s delve into why data preparation and quality are the linchpins for Gen AI success.

The Foundation: Data Preparation

Think of Gen AI as a master chef. No matter how skilled the chef is, the quality of the dish hinges on the ingredients. In the realm of Gen AI, data is the primary ingredient. Just as a chef needs fresh, high-quality ingredients to create a gourmet meal, Gen AI needs well-prepared, high-quality data to generate meaningful and accurate outputs.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

There’s a well-known adage in the data world: “Garbage in, garbage out.” This means that if your Gen AI models are fed poor-quality data, the insights and outputs they generate will be equally flawed. Data preparation involves cleaning, transforming, and organizing raw data into a format suitable for analysis. This step is crucial for several reasons:

Accuracy

Ensuring data is accurate prevents AI models from learning incorrect patterns or making erroneous predictions.

Consistency

Standardizing data formats and removing duplicates ensure that the AI model’s learning process is not disrupted by inconsistencies.

Completeness

Filling in missing values and ensuring comprehensive data coverage allows AI to make more informed and holistic predictions.

The Keystone: Data Quality

Imagine you’ve meticulously prepared your ingredients, but they’re of subpar quality. The dish, despite all your efforts, will be a disappointment. Similarly, even with excellent data preparation, the quality of your data is paramount. High-quality data is relevant, timely, and trustworthy. Here’s why data quality is non-negotiable for Gen AI success:

Relevance

Your Gen AI models need data that is pertinent to the task at hand. Irrelevant data can lead to noise and outliers, causing the model to learn patterns that are not useful or, worse, misleading. For example, if you’re developing a Gen AI model to create personalized marketing campaigns, data on customer purchase history, preferences, and behavior is crucial. Data on their shoe size? Not so much.

Timeliness

Gen AI thrives on the latest data. Outdated information can result in models that are out of sync with current trends and realities. For instance, using last year’s market data to generate this year’s marketing strategies can lead to significant misalignment with the current market demands and changing consumer behavior.

Trustworthiness

Trustworthy data is free from errors and biases. It’s about having confidence that your data reflects the true state of affairs. Biases in data can lead to biased AI models, which can have far-reaching negative consequences. For example, if historical hiring data used to train an AI model contains gender bias, the model might perpetuate these biases in future hiring recommendations.

Real-World Implications

Let’s put this into perspective with some real-world scenarios:

Marketing and Personalization

A retail company leveraging Gen AI to create personalized marketing campaigns can see a substantial boost in customer engagement and sales. However, if the customer data is riddled with inaccuracies—wrong contact details, outdated purchase history, or incorrect preferences—the generated content will miss the mark, leading to disengagement and potentially damaging the brand’s reputation.

Product Development

In product development, Gen AI can accelerate the creation of innovative designs and prototypes. But if the input data regarding customer needs, market trends, and existing product performance is incomplete or outdated, the resulting designs may not meet current market demands or customer needs, leading to wasted resources and missed opportunities.

Healthcare and Diagnostics

In healthcare, Gen AI has the potential to revolutionize diagnostics and personalized treatment plans. However, this requires precise, up-to-date, and comprehensive patient data. Inaccurate or incomplete medical records can lead to incorrect diagnoses and treatment recommendations, posing significant risks to patient health.

The Path Forward: Investing in Data Readiness

To truly harness the power of Gen AI, you must prioritize data readiness. Here’s how to get started:

Data Audits

Conduct regular data audits to assess the current state of your data. Identify gaps, inconsistencies, and areas for improvement. This process should be ongoing to ensure continuous data quality and relevance.

Data Governance

Implement robust data governance frameworks that define data standards, policies, and procedures. This ensures that data is managed consistently and remains high-quality across the organization.

Advanced Data Preparation Tools

Leverage advanced data preparation tools that automate the cleaning, transformation, and integration of data. These tools can significantly reduce the time and effort required to prepare data, allowing your team to focus on strategic analysis and decision-making.

Training and Culture

Foster a culture that values data quality and literacy. Train employees on the importance of data integrity and equip them with the skills to handle data effectively. This cultural shift ensures that everyone in the organization understands and contributes to maintaining high data standards.

The Symbiosis of Data and Gen AI

Gen AI holds immense potential to drive innovation and efficiency across various business domains. However, the success of these initiatives hinges on the quality and preparation of the underlying data. As the saying goes, “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.” In the context of Gen AI, the weakest link is often poor data quality and preparation.

By investing in robust data preparation processes and ensuring high data quality, you can unlock the full potential of Gen AI. This symbiosis between data and AI will not only lead to more accurate and meaningful insights but also drive sustainable competitive advantage in the rapidly evolving digital landscape.

So, your company is ready for Gen AI. But the million-dollar question remains—is your data?

Download our free Gen AI Data Readiness Checklist shared at the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit.

The post Your Company is Ready for Gen AI. But is Your Data? appeared first on Actian.

Gen AI Best Practices for Data Scientists, Engineers, and IT Leaders

As organizations seek to capitalize on Generative AI (Gen AI) capabilities, data scientists, engineers, and IT leaders need to follow best practices and use the right data platform to deliver the most value and achieve desired outcomes. While many best practices are still evolving Gen AI is in its infancy.

Granted, with Gen AI, the amount of data you need to prepare may be incredibly large, but the same approach you’re now using to prep and integrate data for other use cases, such as advanced analytics or business applications, applies to GenAI. You want to ensure the data you gathered will meet your use case needs for quality, formatting, and completeness.

As TechTarget has correctly noted, “To effectively use Generative AI, businesses must have a good understanding of data management best practices related to data collection, cleansing, labeling, security, and governance.”

Building a Data Foundation for GenAI

Gen AI is a type of artificial intelligence that uses neural networks to uncover patterns and structures in data, and then produces content such as text, images, audio, and code. If you’ve interacted with a chatbot online that gives human-like responses to questions or used a program such as ChatGPT, then you’ve experienced Gen AI.

The potential impact of Gen AI is huge. Gartner sees it becoming a general-purpose technology with an impact similar to that of the steam engine, electricity, and the internet.

Like other use cases, Gen AI requires data—potentially lots and lots of data—and more. That “more” includes the ability to support different data formats in addition to managing and storing data in a way that makes it easily searchable. You’ll need a scalable platform capable of handling the massive data volumes typically associated with Gen AI.

Data Accuracy is a Must

Data preparation and data quality are essential for Gen AI, just like they are for data-driven business processes and analytics. As noted in eWeek, “The quality of your data outcomes with Generative AI technology is dependent on the quality of the data you use.

Managing data is already emerging as a challenge for Gen AI. According to McKinsey, 72% of organizations say managing data is a top challenge preventing them from scaling AI use cases. As McKinsey also notes, “If your data isn’t ready for Generative AI, your business isn’t ready for Generative AI.”

While Gen AI use cases differ from traditional analytics use cases in terms of desired outcomes and applications, they all share something in common—the need for data quality and modern integration capabilities. Gen AI requires accurate, trustworthy data to deliver results, which is no different from business intelligence (BI) or advanced analytics.

That means you need to ensure your data does not have missing elements, is properly structured, and has been cleansed. The prepped data can then be utilized for training and testing Gen AI models and gives you a good understanding of the relationships between all your data sets.

You may want to integrate external data with your in-house data for Gen AI projects. The unified data can be used to train models to query your data store for Gen AI applications. That’s why it’s important to use a modern data platform that offers scalability, can easily build pipelines to data sources, and offers integration and data quality capabilities.

Removing Barriers to Gen AI

What I’m hearing from our Actian partners is that organizations interested in implementing Gen AI use cases are leaning toward using natural language processing for queries. Instead of having to write in SQL to query their databases, organizations often prefer to use natural language. One benefit is that you can also use natural language for visualizing data. Likewise, you can utilize natural language for log monitoring and to perform other activities that previously required advanced skills or SQL programming capabilities.

Until recently, and even today in some cases, data scientists would create a lot of data pipelines to ingest data from current, new, and emerging sources. They would prep the data, create different views of their data, and analyze it for insights. Gen AI is different. It’s primarily about using natural language processing to train large language models in conjunction with your data.

Organizations still want to build pipelines, but with a platform like the Actian Data Platform, it doesn’t require a data scientist or advanced IT skills. Business analysts can create pipelines with little to no reliance on IT, making it easier than ever to pull together all the data needed for Gen AI.

With recent capability enhancements to our Actian Data Platform, we’ve enabled low code, no code, and pro code integration options. This makes the platform more applicable to engage more business users and perform more use cases, including those involving Gen AI. These integration options reduce the time spent on data prep, allowing data analysts and others to integrate and orchestrate data movement and pipelines to get the data they need quickly.

A best practice for any use case is to be able to access the required data, no matter where it’s located. For modern businesses, this means you need the ability to explore data across the cloud and on-premises, which requires a hybrid platform that connects and manages data from any environment, for any use case.

Expanding Our Product Roadmap for Gen AI

Our conversations with customers have revealed that they are excited about Gen AI and its potential solutions and capabilities, yet they’re not quite ready to implement Gen AI technologies. They’re focused on getting their data properly organized so it’ll be ready once they decide which use cases and Gen AI technologies are best suited for their business needs.

Customers are telling us that they want solid use cases that utilize the strength of Gen AI before moving forward with it. At Actian, we’re helping by collaborating with customers and partners to identify the right use cases and the most optimal solutions to enable companies to be successful. We’re also helping customers ensure they’re following best practices for data management so they will have the groundwork in place once they are ready to move forward.

In the meantime, we are encouraging customers to take advantage of the strengths of the Actian Data Platform, such as our enhanced capabilities for integration as a service, data quality, and support for database as a service. This gives customers the benefit of getting their data in good shape for AI uses and applications.

In addition, as we look at our product roadmap, we are adding Gen AI capabilities to our product portfolio. For example, we’re currently working to integrate our platform with TensorFlow, which is an open-source machine learning software platform that can complement Gen AI. We are also exploring how our data storage capabilities can be utilized alongside TensorFlow to ensure storage is optimized for Gen AI use cases.

Go From Trusted Data to Gen AI Use Cases

As we talk with customers, partners, and analysts, and participate in industry events, we’ve observed that organizations certainly want to learn more about Gen AI and understand its implications and applications. It’s now broadly accepted that AI and Gen AI are going to be critical for businesses. Even if the picture of exactly how Gen AI will be beneficial is still a bit hazy, the awareness and enthusiasm are real.

We’re excited to see the types of Gen AI applications that will emerge and the many use cases our customers will want to accomplish. Right now, organizations need to ensure they have a scalable data platform that can handle the required data volumes and have data management practices in place to ensure quality, trustworthy data to deliver desired outcomes.

The Actian Data Platform supports the rise of advanced use cases such as Generative AI by automating time-consuming data preparation tasks. You can dramatically cut time aggregating data, handling missing values, and standardizing data from various sources. The platform’s ability to enable AI-ready data gives you the confidence to train AI models effectively and explore new opportunities to meet your current and future needs.

The Actian Data Platform can give you complete confidence in your data for Gen AI projects. Try the platform for free for 30 days to see how easy data can be.

Related resources you may find useful:

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