Business intelligence is an important part of running an enterprise. When it comes to finding the right vendor for business intelligence solutions, sometimes AI and BI become convoluted.
A significant amount of business intelligence vendors are using machine learning as well as artificial intelligence as marketing buzzwords. This is done, obviously, to make their products sound better or have more financial value.
While there are some actual decent applications and use cases for artificial intelligence in data analytics, AI is really only applicable to the largest businesses out there with significant amounts of data. The majority of companies out there are in need of a solid, affordable business intelligence tool to help improve business performance.
But what exactly sets business intelligence apart from artificial intelligence? Are they mutually exclusive? Let’s take a look.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial intelligence, also known as AI, has broad and open definitions. At its core, it is simply the use of simulated human intelligence processes through machines, particularly computers. AI processes typically involve learning, reasoning, and correction.
Some examples of artificial intelligence in the context of business include:
- Spam filters
- E-commerce assistance
- Chatbots
- Process automation
- Virtual assistants
- Security
- Data mining
- Data analytics
- Automated marketing
What is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence, also known as BI, refers to the technologies, applications, solutions, and practices for working with business information. BI typically involves the collection, implementation, analysis, and physical presentation of business data and the act of turning that data into lucrative information for improving the business itself. The purpose of business intelligence is to help the company make better decisions in various ways.
What is the Difference Between Business Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence?
In the context of business intelligence vs artificial intelligence, AI deals with things like logic, reasoning, data mining, etc. Essentially, it deals with automating methods of reasoning and coming to a conclusion as a digital entity.
Business intelligence involves more of a business goal focus, rather than data mining or analytics. Business intelligence has no real algorithm for goal focus, as it is more of s skill of converting raw data to understandable and usable information for the business in question. Such data sources for business intelligence would include search engine use, sources within the company, social media data, customer feedback data, etc.
The main goal of business intelligence is to streamline the often tedious and error-ridden process of collecting and analyzing data in order for a business to improve the quality of data they are monitoring. The main goal of artificial intelligence is to mimic or derive from human intelligence in order to make rational decisions.
When it comes down to it, both business and artificial intelligence can deal with data analytics. And they are far from mutually exclusive. It is not necessary for a business intelligence platform or solution to use AI-- in fact, it can sometimes be somewhat of unnecessary and can often be a cheap selling point if it is not implemented in a very useful way.
On top of this, artificial intelligence as a business intelligence solution isn’t really necessary for small or medium-sized businesses. There just isn’t enough data being poured out of and into the business to warrant the need for automation. In fact, using AI for small-scale data mining could be less efficient than trusting marketers and other business specialists with the task of processing and organizing business data.
AI can certainly improve on or aid business intelligence solutions, but it comes at a cost-- a significant literal cost. For smaller businesses or startups, there just isn’t enough of a budget in most cases to warrant investing in artificial intelligence for business intelligence. When it comes down to it, small businesses can achieve the visualization that is sufficient enough for their size without having to invest in expensive artificial intelligence solutions.
For larger enterprises, though, AI as a business intelligence solution could be very promising. Business intelligence and artificial intelligence are distinct concepts, but they can complement one another when it comes to massive data mining needs.
AI is able to further improve established computer intelligence, while traditional BI approaches help to make business decisions that data analysis and company visualization can provide. BI can help larger businesses to better organize the massive amounts of data they need to collect. Unfortunately, traditional BI with its fancy visualizations and dashboards can’t be quite as efficient as it needs to be. In this sense, AI can help business intelligence tools produce better, more insightful information from the data it analyzes.
Where Does DashboardFox Fit In?
DashboardFox is a business intelligence platform designed for small to mid-sized businesses. We make it easy to tap into business data from a variety of sources and securely share it with the people in the company who need to know.
As a platform, we provide real-time dashboards, a central library of reports, scheduled email delivery of data, codeless, self-service report building, and more.
We are sometimes asked about features related to machine learning and artificial intelligence and as described in this article, it’s not something we focus on as a provider to small and mid-sized businesses. Our focus is on the business intelligence aspect of data mining. Of course, you can do algorithms and formulas in our report builder, but we’re not back in the lab working on Skynet.
With that said, DashboardFox does have a robust API, and if you do have other AI or Machine Learning technology, you can integrate DashboardFox as a data broker to easily pipe data from multiple sources into that or any other integrated system. So DashboardFox may place a part in an integrated ecosystem of tools.
Contact us to learn more about DashboardFox and see a live demo with one of our experts. We can talk about your specific needs and see if DashboardFox is a fit.
How do you feel about business intelligence and artificial intelligence? Do you believe one is more useful than the other? We want to hear your opinion in the comments below!