Today we navigate our way across cities, pull up electronic tickets, purchase items, monitor our health and, of course, stay connected with friends and family on our smartphones. It’s one of those innovations that later makes us think, just how did I ever function without it?
Much like smartphones revolutionized our personal lives, augmented analytics is on the cusp of becoming the business world’s next big evolution.
Augmented analytics was identified by Gartner as the number 1 top trend for data and analytics technology in 2019 and market leaders are already starting to invest in this burgeoning industry.
SAP recently acquired augmented people analytics company Qualtrics for $8 billion, shelling out a price equivalent to over 20x the company’s current revenue. A newcomer to the game, Denver based startup Nodin raised $5 million in funding this past March, a month before even launching its platform.
In fact, the global market for augmented analytics is forecasted to reach $29.86 billion by 2025.
But just what is augmented analytics and what makes it such a hot new trend?
Data or Die
According to a recent study by Forbes Insights and Treasure Data, only 13 percent of companies can be considered ‘leaders’ in leveraging the full potential of their customer data. This is significant as 55 percent of executives consider these insights to be important in achieving disruptive innovation.
Companies must now collect, clean, and translate their raw data into insights they can use to build better products and reach target audiences. In today’s fast-paced business world, data-driven decisions are no longer just nice to have, they’re a necessity to stay competitive and on top of market volatility.
To get ahead, major players from Booking.com to PepsiCo are relying on teams of data analysts to collect, clean, and analyze the surge of data now being generated. SME’s are also leveraging their data to gain a competitive advantage in a sea of new competitors popping up every day.
The problem is that data analysts are not only scarce in number, they’re also extremely expensive, especially for SME’s.
Even for companies that do have data scientists on board, the sheer volume of the data we’re now collecting through various platforms and tools means that they actually spend more of their time on activities like data preparation and visualization, leaving less time for actual analysis.
Augmented analytics harnesses the power of AI and machine learning to automate these tasks and generate insights.
Let’s say you’re an ecommerce store that’s seen a sudden decrease in sales on your Shopify account. To find out why, you’d have to comb through your company’s data and find insights by:
- Logging in to Google Analytics to analyze patterns in your website traffic
- Checking out the performance of your social media accounts and ad campaigns
- Reassessing your keywords on Google Adwords
- Investigating new competitors or changes in the market
Instead, augmented analytics tools collect and analyze all your data together to identify potential causes and automatically generate reports with actionable insights.
Here are 3 major ways this service will disrupt the business world:
We’re in a Data Race – the Winner Takes the Money
With most businesses adopting artificial decision making capabilities, we’re now in a race to see who can make the faster, better business decisions.
Our businesses are like data-guzzling V12 engines that need data to fuel growth. Automating this process, and using augmented analytics to spot growth opportunities in your data, before your competitors, means you win the race.
Gartner believes that by 2020 over 40% of data science tasks will be automated. This will allow data scientists to spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time on strategic analysis and decision-making.
Not only does it take the manual labor out of their job, it also does it faster and eliminates the potential for human error.
Bringing Together the Whole Picture
At the moment, most company’s data lives on several different platforms – isolated. In fact, only 34% of executives agreed they have one aggregated view of all their customer data points.
Not only is this inefficient, it also blocks businesses from making informed decisions. We shouldn’t be looking at how each part of the engine works separately but how it all works together.
Having data points integrated in a rapid reporting system, such as Aerialscoop or DataBox, allows you to track the entire customer journey on one platform, all the way from lead generation until earning your first dollar from the client.
It also allows for better cohesion and collaboration across the organization. It’s not just ‘how is my marketing team doing on their KPIs?’ but how are the marketing team’s results directly impacting my revenue growth and retention rates.
Democratize your Data Analytics
Meanwhile, for smaller companies that don’t have the means to hire a team of data scientists (currently the global average salary is $90k); augmented analytics will make data-driven insights accessible to the masses. This is expected to be a major wave of development of the next five years.
According to Gartner, through 2020 the number of citizen data scientists will grow five times faster than professional data scientists.
This means everyone from executives to marketers will have the power to make data driven decisions, without having to rely on data science professionals to provide the information they need.
This opens doors for SME’s to accelerate their growth at an exponential rate across departments. If there was ever a time that smaller, more nimble start-ups were able to really pose a real threat to major companies, the democratization of data analytics ought to be the catalyst.
Much like smartphones have become the tool we can’t imagine our lives without, augmented analytics will set a new standard for business growth.
Those who start to leverage this technology early on will reap the benefits that faster, aggregated, and accessible data can bring. Where will your company stand in the data race of the future?
