Humanity in Business Intelligence - The Digital Way

A confluence of forces is propelling both digital transformation and business intelligence into the mainstream of thinking technologies today. We are looking at a lot of potentially disruptive forces businesses are introducing into their business intelligence programs resulting in digital transformation. It is happening for commercial benefit, of course, but with the help of human touch, automated descriptions and talking bots. We, at Celeix Digital, are seeing it as a culmination of both business intelligence and digital transformation, calling it Digital Intelligence. Digital Intelligence is the ability to sense, learn, think, interact and take actions as expected and it is happening as you read this. 

And most companies are already trying to do what makes sense, not necessarily visible in their numbers. We see a lot of digital transformation and business intelligence becoming disruptive thanks to such startups for showing us what is possible but speed and scale together are becoming difficult to achieve. Technology is still an enabler and not an end in itself for most of the global economy. The industry itself is holding its horses because it doesn’t make sense to shoot for the ‘possible’ when the possibilities themselves are constantly shifting. Ray Kurzweil, now Director of Engineering at Google, made a fortune developing computer voice recognition software back in 2012 and is probably the first pioneer in merging humanity in a digital setup. That is the first example of digital intelligence in action, the business intelligence is being used to achieve Digital Transformation for the sake of humanity. He is perhaps one of those who could be conferred with the title of a techno-utopian, for he believed that technological progress will culminate in a merger of human and business intelligence - the digital way. 

Digital Intelligence is going to change the way we do a lot of things. Businesses need to prepare to use people for digital intelligence matters and get some of the transformation process work done. Digital Intelligence is more of a skill set, but only if done with great vigilance, with safeguards to ensure that we do not escape human control and pose an existential threat to humanity. In common language, we need technologies that can understand, reason, learn, and interact. We also need help in developing customer insights to form a large pool of data sets that can perform analytical tasks at a much faster pace than we could ever perform. At the same time, we should also learn to add an intelligence layer to the data and allow it to be given more ability to do it on a much bigger scale. In this blog, we are going to look at the likes of digital intelligence happening in various formats and how digital intelligence is already a part of our daily lives.

Conversational Business Intelligence 

This field of Digital Intelligence, in broader terms, is kind of a conversation using intelligence with technological tools. It could also become one of those fields that are so easy for the tech world to interpret and extrapolate way beyond its intended capabilities. All tech giants including Google, IBM, Yahoo, Intel, Apple, and Salesforce are all competing in the race to be the first. Recently, Intel also started an initiative to train 15,000 professionals on Business Intelligence tools and their applicative analysis. Intel aims to fix the biggest problem in Digital Intelligence (they are not calling that yet, we are) space restraining its growth until now - the lack of skilled workforce in this sector. Until a few years ago, Artificial Intelligence was the next big thing - computers would be able to reason and become so smart they would think for us. 

In reality, that’s a pretty lazy way of pushing the blame for wrong and insensitive decisions onto an inanimate entity. On the other hand, these digital exploits should be confined to the technological spread of machines but the intelligence should remain human. At Celeix Digital, we believe human intelligence coupled with the digital help of available products should do the trick. There are many possibilities of passing it as a disruptive affair yet it is more evolutionary and gradual yet sustaining improvements of the existing technological tools. 

Like Professor Stephen Hawking warned us, ‘Artificial Intelligence will be either the best or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity. We stand on the same lines that Artificial Intelligence alone could lead to the destruction of the Digital Transformation intended if the human part of it isn’t taken into consideration. As humans, we are limited by slow biological evolution, cannot compete and would be superseded when the human factor goes missing from dinner table conversations. We are going to look at a few examples that considered this human factor — 

— Mailchimp has a system called ‘Omnivore’ in place that automatically scans your electronic mail subscriber import. On suspicion, Omnivore flags the list for having a large number of addresses that may cause complaints, high bounce rates, or back-listings. Mailchimp then notifies its users that according to their research (Business Intelligence) such as malpractice can lead to increased abuse and complaint rates (Digital Transformation). 

— City Union Bank became the first bank in the world to introduce a robot to deal with customer queries. This robot (aptly named ‘Lakshmi - the goddess of prosperity) was based on IBM Watson’s Business Intelligence tool engine and could rattle off answers to almost 125 different customer queries. It started to find patterns a human would never see providing a valuable edge. This isn’t foolproof, though, as it only assigns probabilities to outcomes. However, because the volume of available data has skyrocketed, this kind of Digital Intelligence can improve its outcomes far more quickly than the traditional methodologies in place. 

— The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), National Security Agency (NSA) and John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU-APL) have formed a partnership to conduct jointly-sponsored research - in collaboration with the private sector - resulting in a strategy for increasing the speed and scale of cyber defences by leveraging automation to enhance the effectiveness of human defenders, moving them outside the response loop into a response planning and approval ‘on the loop’ of cyber defence. 

Efficiency! Thy name is Digital Intelligence 

Digital Intelligence is happening and its efficiency of it will be starting to become visible as the years go by. This opportunity needs to be explored on how both human touch and automation can complement each other. At Celeix Digital, we believe the purpose of this blog is to augment human capabilities to levels that can be understood by way of another tangible tool, rather than, some kind of mysticism. We also believe it is time to harness the full power of Business Intelligence by allowing humankind to be a part and parcel of the daily tools we use. It just needs the right strategy, investment, and patience. Digital Intelligence is already here - it is our collective job as leaders of integrity to harness and focus its impact and power to be more human in approach towards digital change.