Narrowing the AI-BI Gap with Exploratory Analysis Posted on : Dec 30 - 2021

The worlds of AI and BI occupy distinct places in the analytics continuum, which is most often understood with concepts like descriptive analytics, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics. Users can leverage descriptive analytics and BI tools to explore what happened in the past, while predictive analytics makes use of ML models trained on real-world data to generate an educated guess about what will happen next.

However, the lines separating these two camps are getting more blurry by the month. For years, Gartner has talked about how BI tool vendors are adding more ML and AI capabilities to their wares. In its latest Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI Platforms, the firm talked about how the next generation of “augmented analytic” products will bring ML and AI to bear on things like data prep, query generation, and insight generation. At the same time, we’re seeing vendors that develop data science development and AutoML environments embrace SQL as a necessary ingredient for data preparation, manipulation, and interrogation.

One of the newer vendors in this segment is Tellius, an analytics startup based in Reston, Virgina. According to Tellius CEO and founder Ajay Khanna, there’s a functionality gap between what the top BI and AI tools can do.

“On the BI side, we see tools like Tableau, PowerBI, and Qlik do a pretty good job of visualization, but that’s kind of where they stop,” Khanna says. “And most of the business users and analyst we talk to want to go beyond visualization to understand why things are happening, but that process is very manual. That’s looking from the BI lens.”

When Khanna views the situation through the ML and AI lens, he finds technical complexity that exceeds the abilities of your regular business user or analyst.

“If you look at DataRobot–amazing company,” he continues. “But look at the interface. It still has a technical names like ‘area under curve’ and ‘confusion matrix.’ Those are not things which the typical business user or the analyst understands. So we see this huge insights gap created by these two silos. Our vision is to bridge that gap.” View More