How Einstein Analytics Is Changing Business Intelligence

The cloud-based program offers data analytics via artificial intelligence

The rapid growth in the amount of available data has made manual dives into large data sets a time-consuming task.

Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, such as Salesforce, have made compiling and viewing data much easier, but spotting every trend or testing every strategy can take huge numbers of man-hours. This was the impetus for the creation of Einstein Analytics. The San Francisco-based cloud computing company has developed a new analytics program that uses artificial intelligence to quickly analyze billions of data points and combinations.

Einstein Analytics is changing how many companies approach analytics offering insight into the direction in which business intelligence is headed.

Analytics Apps

Essentially, Einstein Analytics researches the data compiled by companies, identifies trends within the data and uses this information to make recommendations for future strategy. The program is built on top of Salesforce’s CRM system.

Einstein Analytics gives users access to a portfolio of analytics apps that can be applied to data in the Salesforce Marketing, Services and Sales clouds. It is paired with Einstein Discovery, which focuses on recommendations from actionable data.

The idea is to give organizational leaders more insight into what their own data can tell them. “We have more customer data than ever before, and we need AI to turn data into something actionable for the business user,” said Arijit Sengupta, head of Einstein Discovery, in a 2017 article by Larry Dignan of ZDNet.

Ketan Karkhanis, general manager, Salesforce Analytics, provided CMSWire with an example of how Einstein Analytics might be used in a real scenario. A salesperson concerned about making quarterly numbers could use the smart cloud analytics app to dig into data on customer, competitor and sales pipeline data. Einstein Analytics could then recommend setting up a meeting with a certain customer because that person tends to close sales faster.

How It Affects Businesses

Businesses can gain an advantage by leveraging the Einstein systems in many ways, including the following:

Speed

In addition to the ability to deliver insights from data, Einstein Analytics is faster and more efficient, as Salesforce notes, than a team of data scientists. By leveraging artificial intelligence, Salesforce predicts companies will make decisions 38% faster.

Predictions

In data analytic platforms like Einstein Analytics, AI handles that task of validating every piece of data. The system also looks into customer sentiment in a variety of ways, including comments made on social media. As described in the earlier example about the salesperson, it can also be used to manage day-to-day workflow, allowing employees to optimize their time.

The Community Cloud

In the same 2017 article by ZDNet, Sengupta, head of Einstein Discovery, said, “Einstein Analytics can discover relevant content on social media, alerting companies to good content and also to influencers who write within a certain niche. This can give organizational leaders real-time feedback on certain products or services, and not just their own but those of competitors.”

Data Analysis

Einstein can crunch millions of data points on any number of “triggering events,” such as transactions that are part of daily workflow like incoming calls or even a sale. It can also analyze data from the “internet of things”, another growing area for many businesses.

Does this make data scientists obsolete? That is unlikely to happen any time soon, as business leaders tend to want decisions based on data to be made by people. However, as self-learning networks continue to expand and become more sophisticated, recommendations on business actions from AI such as Einstein Analytics could become the new normal.