Business Analytics Future Trends

Artificial Intelligence

• AI refers to multiple technologies, working in tandem to allow the machines to

sense, learn, understand, and act to augment human capabilities.
• AI technology can learn and handle vast amounts of information that will enhance
and transform operations in different fields effectively.
• Over a certain period of learning and comprehending, AI technology can
anticipate needs and make informed and relevant decisions.
• Unlike business intelligence technology, which analyzes data and leaves the
decision-making parts for human beings, AI will make decisions after analyzing
data.
 Artificial Intelligence
• Artificial intelligence in business simply involves the use of intelligent computer
software with human-like capabilities to boost revenue, improve customer
experience, increase productivity and efficiency, and drive business growth and
transformation.
• The need for businesses to uniquely understand the needs and preferences of
customers is invaluable in today’s business world; to thrive and maintain
relevance within the fierce competition.
• Using artificial intelligence in business, companies can now uniquely understand
and engage customers, automate business processes and improve productivity and
revenue while reducing operational expenses.
 Artificial Intelligence in Business
AI IN CUSTOMER SERVICE
• The replacement of humans with AI in customer service is another controversial
example of artificial intelligence in business. With the advent of chat-bots,
customers can now interact with companies in real-time to resolve complaints,
place orders, get information and do almost anything they would require from
having a conversation with a human customer-care representative.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
• With the increasing amount of available business data, finding insights from the
data can be quite challenging. This has driven the routine adoption of artificial
intelligence in business intelligence to obtain valuable insights from data.
• These insights help companies improve the effectiveness of marketing,
understand customers better, perform segmentation to create personalized
experiences, and develop business strategies to aid corporate decision making and
leverage artificial intelligence in business management.
 Artificial Intelligence in Business
PERSONALIZED AND TARGETED MARKETING
The key to growing company revenue requires knowing the wants of a consumer
and knowing what to market to each consumer. In our world of increasing digital
engagement, customers have extremely limited time with too many companies
trying to market their products to them. This accounts for the rising need to market
only what attracts each customer and knowing who to market each of a company’s
product too.
With data obtained from the online activities of customers, companies can now use
AI to predict and target who to market a particular product to in order to increase
the chances of sales and effectiveness of marketing activities at the same time,
reducing the overall marketing cost.
 Artificial Intelligence in Business
PRODUCT RECOMMENDATION AND PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
To increase the effectiveness of marketing efforts and the engagement of customers
with a company’s product, companies need to be able to recommend products that
will retain the interest of their customers and satisfy the desires of a customer.
Companies like Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, etc., now use AI to understand the
habits/behaviors of customers to predict which product to recommend.

Spotify, for example, monitors and understands the listening behaviour and song
preferences of users and uses AI to provide song recommendations that each user
may likely enjoy. Other companies like Netflix make use of AI recommendation
systems to keep users entertained and addicted to their product by providing movie
recommendations that appeals uniquely to each user, based on their distinct
experiences.
 Machine Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is composed of systems that allow computers to imitate

human cognitive processes or perform tasks that used to be done by humans.
Machine learning is defined as systems that enable a computer system to learn from
inputs, rather than being directed only by linear programming.
In this context, another way to explain “machine intelligence” is that through a basis
of machine learning and artificial intelligence, the machine learns to work
proactively.
Theoretically, if a machine learns to extract various kinds of data to put together its
own processes and arrive at its own conclusions, you could say that that constitutes
machine intelligence based on both machine learning and artificial
 Text Mining
• Widely used in knowledge-driven organizations, text mining is the process of
examining large collections of documents to discover new information or help
answer specific research questions.
• Text mining identifies facts, relationships and assertions that would otherwise
remain buried in the mass of textual big data.
• Once extracted, this information is converted into a structured form that can be
further analyzed, or presented directly using clustered tables, mind maps, charts,
etc.
• Text mining employs a variety of methodologies to process the text, one of the
most important of these being Natural Language Processing (NLP).
• The structured data created by text mining can be integrated into databases, data
warehouses or business intelligence dashboards and used for descriptive,
prescriptive or predictive analytics.
 Web Analytics
Web analytics is the collection, reporting, and analysis of website data. The focus is
on identifying measures based on organizational and user goals and using the
website data to determine the success or failure of those goals and to drive strategy
and improve the user’s experience.
There is a lot of data that can be collected about the way people interact with your
website.
Overall traffic
It refer to the number of visits your site gets over a specific period of time. This number is
significant, because it tells if your website is getting the attention it deserves.
Bounce rate
When someone visits web site and leaves without viewing a second page, we call that a
‘bounce’. The percentage of those visits get measured against overall traffic makes up bounce
rate.
Traffic sources
In most cases, first-time visitors will find website via links instead of typing in your URL. The
pages that link to web site are traffic sources
Desktop vs. mobile visits
 What are Intelligent Agents
An intelligent agent is a software program that supports a user with the
accomplishment of some task or activity by collecting information automatically
over the internet and communicating data with other agents depending on the
algorithm of the program.
Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce, is a type of industry
where buying and selling of product or service is conducted over electronic systems
such as the Internet and other computer networks.
Electronic commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic
funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction
processing, inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems.
Intelligent Agents and E commerce
• Customized customer assistance with online services: news filtering messaging, scheduling,
making arrangements for gatherings, ordering, and so on.
• Customer profiling, including inferring information about customer behavior based on
business experiences with the particular customer.
• Integrating profiles of customers into a group of marketing activities.
• Negotiating price and payment schedules.
• Executing financial transactions on the customer’s behalf.
 Social Network Analysis
Social network analysis [SNA] is the mapping and measuring of relationships and
flows between people, groups, organizations, computers, and other connected
information/knowledge.
Social network analysis is concerned with attributes of pairs of individuals, of
which binary relations are the main kind. Some examples of dyadic attributes:

Kinship: brother of, father of

Social Roles: boss of, teacher of, friend of
Affective: likes, respects, hates
Cognitive: knows, views as similar
Actions: talks to, has lunch with, attacks
Flows: number of cars moving between
Distance: number of miles between
Co-occurrence: is in the same club as, has the same color hair as
 Social Network Analysis
Kinds of Network Analysis
There are two basic kinds of network analysis: Ego network analysis, and Complete
network analysis.
Ego network analysis can be done in the context of traditional surveys. Each
respondent is asked about the people they interact with, and about the relationships
among those people.
Typically, the analysis of ego networks involves assessing the quality of a person's
networks (size, diversity, average income, etc.) or relating attributes of ego with
attributes of their alters (homophily).
Complete network analysis is where you try to obtain all the relationships among a
set of respondents, such as all the friendships among employees of a given
company.
Most of the rhetoric surrounding network analysis is based on complete networks.
Techniques such as subgroup analysis, require complete networks.
 Why Social Network Analysis?
Effectiveness & mapping
Social Network Analysis is useful if you wish to understand the effectiveness of
network both offline or online. Network Analysis also helps you to map the flow of
information in a network.

Uncover trends & Pattern

SNA is valuable if you are looking to discover new trends or patterns. Valdis E.
Krebs, a network scientist in his widely praised paper, shared how network analysis
can be used to identify terrorist networks.

Find value & Test Hypothesis

SNA can be used to test a hypothesis in online behavior and to determine causes for
dysfunctional communities and networks, and to promote social cohesion and
growth in the online community.
 Big Data: Tools and Techniques
• Big data gets generated in multi terabyte quantities. It changes fast and comes in
varieties of forms that are difficult to manage and process using RDBMS or other
traditional technologies. 80% of the data getting generated today is unstructured
and cannot be handled by our traditional technologies.
• Big data is simply too large and complex data that cannot be dealt with using
traditional data processing methods. Big Data requires a set of tools and
techniques for analysis to gain insights from it.
• Big Data is an essential part of almost every organization these days and to get
significant results through Big Data Analytics a set of tools is needed at each
phase of data processing and analysis.
• There are a few factors to be considered while opting for the set of tools i.e., the
size of the datasets, pricing of the tool, kind of analysis to be done, and many
more.
• With the exponential growth of Big Data, the market is also flooded with its
various tools. These tools used in big data help in bringing out better cost
efficiency and thus increases the speed of analysis.
 Big Data: Tools and Techniques
• Apache Hadoop is one of the most popularly used tools in the Big Data industry.
Apache Hadoop enables parallel processing of data as it works on multiple
machines simultaneously.
• Hadoop does not support real-time processing. It only supports batch processing.
• Hadoop cannot do in-memory calculations.
• Apache Spark can be considered as the successor of Hadoop as it overcomes the
drawbacks of it. Spark, unlike Hadoop, supports both real-time as well as batch
processing. It also supports in-memory calculations, which makes it 100 times
faster than Hadoop.
• Apache Storm is an open-source big data tool, distributed real-time and fault-
tolerant processing system. It efficiently processes unbounded streams of data.
• Unbounded streams, refers to the data that is ever-growing and has a beginning but no defined
end.
• The biggest advantage of Apache Storm is that it can be used with any of the programming
languages
 Big Data: Tools and Techniques
• MongoDB is an open-source data analytics tool, NoSQL database that provides
cross-platform capabilities. It is exemplary for a business that needs fast-moving
and real-time data for taking decisions.
• Apache Kafka is a distributed event processing or streaming platform which
provides high throughput to the systems. It is efficient enough to handle trillions
of events a day. It is a streaming platform that is highly scalable and also provides
great fault tolerance.
• Tableau is one of the best data visualization and software solution tools in the
Business Intelligence industry. It’s a tool that unleashes the power of your data. It
turns your raw data into valuable insights and enhancing the decision-making
process of the businesses.
• R Programming (R) is an open-source programming language and is one of the
most comprehensive statistical analysis languages. It is one of the most widely
used statistical analysis tools as it provides a vast package ecosystem.
• Flink, Apache Cassandra, RapidMiner are some other Bigdata tools
 Content analysis
Content analysis defines a family of technologies that processes digital content and
user behavior in consuming and engaging with content, such as documents, news
sites, customer conversations (both audio and text), and social network discussions,
to answer specific questions.
The goal of content analysis is to gain new insights for improved decision-making.
For example, a pattern in unstructured content may explain a trend in structured
data, or vice versa.
Sentiment analysis and opinion mining is the field of study that analyzes people's
opinions, sentiments, evaluations, attitudes, and emotions from written language.
It is one of the most active research areas in natural language processing and is also
widely studied in data mining, Web mining, and text mining.
 Content analysis
Sentiment analysis systems are being applied in almost every business and social
domain because opinions are central to almost all human activities and are key
influencers of our behaviors.
Our beliefs and perceptions of reality, and the choices we make, are largely
conditioned on how others see and evaluate the world.
For these reason, when we need to make a decision we often seek out the opinions
of others. This is true not only for individuals but also for organizations.
 Ethical and Legal considerations in Business Analytics
Business analytics raises a number of ethical issues, especially as companies begin
monetizing their data externally for purposes different from those for which the data
was initially collected. The scale and ease with which analytics can be conducted
today completely changes the ethical framework.
Some of the ethical principles are:
• Private customer data and identity should remain private
• Shared private information should be treated confidentially
• Data should not interfere with human will
• Data should not institutionalize unfair biases like racism or sexism.
• Ensure fairness in Automated Decisions
• Respect the Law
• Protect People from Inaccurate Data
 Ethical and Legal considerations in Business Analytics
Core Issues that are important on a global basis for the use and development of
Analytics in ethics-informed ways:
• Transparency
• Data ownership and control
• Accessibility of data
• Validity and reliability of data
• Institutional responsibility and obligation to act
• Communications
• Consent