Business Intelligence and Machine Learning: Data Matters, Not Just the User Experience

As artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) begin to move out of academia into the business world, there's been a lot of focus on how they can help business intelligence (BI). There are a lot of potential in systems that use natural language search to help management more quickly investigate corporate information, perform analysis, and define business plans. A previous column discussing "self-service" business intelligence (BI) briefly mentioned two areas of focus where ML can help BI. While the user interface, the user experience (UX), matters, it's visibility is only the tip of the iceberg. The data being supplied to the UX is even more important.