Analytics and business intelligence (BI) have long been understood to be fundamental to business success. Today, powerful technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), make it possible to gain deeper insights into all areas of business activity in order to drive efficiency, reduce waste and gain a better understanding of customers. Truly benefiting from analytics – particularly the most advanced and powerful analytics techniques involving AI – requires developing a top-to-bottom culture of data literacy throughout an organization and this, in my experience, is where many businesses are still failing. This is highlighted by one particular statistic that came up during my recent webinar conversation with Amir Orad, CEO of Sisense. Orad told me that according to his observations, 80 percent of employees in the average organization simply aren't leveraging the analytics that, in theory, are available to them.

Data analytics and business intelligence are imperative to enhance business growth today. They have far-reaching benefits like improving customer experience, delivering better services, developing agility, risk management, fraud detection, and many more. AI has been a blessing to industries so that they could create better and intelligent insight. These data-driven insights are the crux of businesses today and companies are trying to get to these insights as fast as possible. The customer-centric approaches in the current scenario and the fast-paced technology-driven businesses demand faster insights.

With intelligence at the heart of all digital businesses, IT and business leaders are continuing to make analytics and BI a top investment priority. Gartner's latest Hype Cycle report identified five of the main trends within this trajectory. The report also offered insights for data and analytics leaders to help make the transition to augmented analytics, to build a digital culture and to operationalise and scale analytics initiatives." Augmented analytics uses machine learning to automate data preparation, insight discovery, data science, and machine learning model development and insight sharing for a broad range of business users, operational workers and citizen data scientists. Gartner says, as it matures, augmented analytics will become a key feature of modern analytics platforms. "It will deliver analysis to everyone in an organisation in less time, with less of a requirement for skilled users, and with less interpretative bias than current manual approaches.

In this seminar, Dr Barry Devlin lays the architectural foundation to enable you to take advantage of AI and IoT data in the context of data warehouses and lakes, operational systems, analytics and business intelligence. With the enormous growth of data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices and social media, as well as the reinvention of business through analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), the time has come to revamp your information architecture, expand your technology, and upskill your staff to support automated and augmented decision making and action taking in a fully digital business. A digital business combines the traditional physical environment and the modern digital world in transformative ways. In the process, it creates innovative opportunities for success as well as insidious threats to old ways of doing business. From finance to fashion, telecommunications to transport, businesses that reinvent their processes to become pervasively digitalized will survive and thrive; those that ignore this major shift will wither and die.

A one-day seminar that lays the foundation to enable you to take advantage of AI and IoT data, building upon familiar computing paradigms such as programming, operational systems, databases, analytics and Business Intelligence. With the enormous growth of Big Data, especially from Internet of Things (IoT) devices, now is the time to start planning for and building skills and infrastructure in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and IoT to take advantage of new technologies in support of Decision Making in your business. Artificial Intelligence has had a long and chequered history. Multiple periods of over-optimism have been followed by "AI Winters" since the 1950s. AI has come of age and is being embedded in mainstream technology from cars to call centres, and smartphones to IT systems, enabled in large part by IoT.

Human life is highly unpredictable, and in order to mitigate the ill effects of this unpredictability, the concept of insurance was born. As the world around is getting more complex and advanced, the rising intensity of unpredictability is not only boosting the insurance sector but also making things more challenging and difficult for the business enterprises in this sector. Thankfully, and analytics visualization are coming forward as potential game changers in the sector and enabling enterprises to streamline their operations. Across the globe, overall size of datasets with insurance companies is growing very rapidly in size every single day, and the evolution of artificial intelligence is proving to be really useful for them in terms of dealing with this data. In simple terms, cognitive computing is a computerized emulation of the way human beings think.