For most business leaders, making decisions is no longer a simple process. Increased globalization, the rise of digital and hybrid workplaces, and the rapid development of new technologies are just some of the considerations that need to be taken into account when making strategic, technical, and operational decisions.
With so many layers of data points to analyze and connect, it can be difficult to arrive at the best decision for the organization. What business leaders need is a trusted way to sift through all the information and find the insights that will actually contribute to more effective decision making.
This is where innovations like explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) can significantly improve data analysis and make decision intelligence achievable, leading teams to valuable outcomes like minimized risk and increased profitability.
What is Decision Intelligence and Why Is It Valuable?
Decision intelligence leverages AI, advanced data analytics, and decision making processes to turn raw data into actionable business insights. When business leaders use technologies that enable decision intelligence they can make more informed decisions by predicting future trends, identifying potential risks, and finding new opportunities.
At its heart, decision intelligence is the data-driven way to untangle complex problems and discover clear, actionable strategies to solve them. The goal is to make the leap from data to impact so that companies can realize benefits including:
- Predictive modeling: By using historical data and sophisticated models, businesses can forecast future events with greater precision.
- Optimized analytic processes: Automated analytics can surface inefficiencies and suggest improvements in natural, conversational language—typically by leveraging XAI.
- Enhanced data visualizations: Clear visualizations that are easily interpreted better illustrate complex stories in interconnected data.
- Visibility across complex infrastructures: Provides a view into all disparate data in one easy-to-navigate space so teams can see the bigger picture faster.
- Risk and threat detection: Decision intelligence platforms leverage machine learning routines to quickly identify outliers and vulnerabilities.
Challenges to Adopting Decision Intelligence
Gaining decision intelligence isn’t as easy as flipping on a switch. Disconnected data systems leave teams with unanswered questions, preventing them from taking the right actions to minimize disruptions and optimize performance.
Likewise, traditional business intelligence tools lack the advanced analytics capabilities—like network graphs and scenario planning tools—to help analysts do the deep data exploration that uncovers all the nuanced information and relationships that help business leaders make smarter decisions.
Lastly, a lack of trust in AI technologies prevents organizations from adopting AI more widely.
Turning this sentiment around is vital as innovations in AI are a boon to data analysis, speeding up analytical and interpretation practices so that companies can get to more accurate answers faster.
How Explainable AI Democratizes Decision Intelligence
Fortunately, XAI helps make AI-driven answers more clear, approachable, and transparent, which enables business leaders to get more comfortable using AI to build their data intelligence muscle.
One way XAI creates trust is by delivering key insights and next steps in conversational language and augmenting explanations with visualizations to help users better understand how the system came to its answer. For example, supply chain managers can use XAI to determine why the system is suggesting certain suppliers or how it concluded the best way to optimize inventory levels. Read more about What is Explainable AI and How it Impacts Business Analysis
Virtualitics AI-driven Decision Intelligence applications are built with XAI at its heart to not only ensure that answers provided by the platform can be trusted but also empower users to get even more competitive advantage out of their data.
Putting Decision Intelligence to Work
Here are a few areas where Virtualitics’s Decision Intelligence apps give business leaders a powerful yet easy-to-use way to leverage the benefits of data-driven decision making and insights:
Integrated Readiness Optimization + Maintenance Decision Intelligence
To streamline critical maintenance decisions, maintenance teams must consider pre-existing maintenance activities, simulate future asset usage, predict failures, optimize inventory, prioritize your facilities and manpower, and more. This requires pulling data together from multiple sources and then analyzing the vast amounts of information within them to arrive at an actionable insight quickly.
Virtualitics not only brings all your data together to give maintenance teams a big-picture view of operations, the platform also delivers AI-driven answers in conversational language that guides teams in their decision making as they respond to events and improve availability.
Using technologies like machine learning and survival analysis, Virtualitics helps maintenance teams quickly understand what is about to fail, what the right response is, and consider additional scenarios identified by the AI system.
Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity analysts are overloaded with information coming from multiple assets and databases, often with conflicting insights on the best path forward. Reacting to ever-evolving cyber threats can often be hindered by information that is out of date and compounded by the massive amounts of overlapping information across devices, networks, and systems.
AI is a vital and potent tool in mitigating cyber risks. Virtualitics assists teams in finding and managing risk across their network while accounting for the real-world threats that normally block decisions. For example, by providing the ultimate priority list based on unique factors, including individual levels of vulnerability and real-world risk factors, Virtualitics ensures the right vulnerabilities are top of mind and first to action.
Transform Decisions Into Action
Decision intelligence is a transformative approach that gives organizations a trusted way to make better decisions. When powered by XAI, decision makers can more easily understand what the data is telling them and why leveraging the decision intelligence system’s insights will give them the best path forward.
As the business landscape continues to be more complex and competitive than ever, Decision Intelligence will play a critical role in driving strategic success and operational excellence across various industries. Click here to request a demo and see more about MDI.
