I recently attended IBM’s THINK conference in Vegas, a massive event where IBM announce their vision of the future.  What I took away from the conference was that every IBM Cognos Analytics clients should plan for the future with Artificial Intelligence (AI).  As CEO, Ginni Rometty stated, “The future is man and machine.  Not man verses machine.”  (For more info on the Think message check out  https://www.pund-it.com/blog/ibm-think-2018-and-the-era-of-man-machine/)

The underlying message is clear.  The business world is about to be massively disrupted with the power of artificial intelligence (AI).  Companies that plan for AI will be positioned to dominate their markets.   Some IBM Cognos clients I talk to say they are not ready for it.  They haven’t fully realized the benefits of the IBM Cognos Analytics (BI) software so how can they think about AI?   Other’s state they don’t know where to even start. 

I am here to tell you it’s not as scary as it seems.  It’s quite exciting.  You see Artificial Intelligence is simply a machine that can learn.  A machine that can filter through massive amounts of data and see relationships in the data that a human might never find. 

The data always tells a story, but sometimes we don’t know what the story is saying because we are drowning in data and starving for insight.  We often overwhelm our users with dashboards and reports. Imagine giving them instead, the information they really need.  With AI, the machines provide the insight faster.

Let me give you a healthcare example that IBM presented a couple years ago at their annual conference.  At the IBM event, a doctor from the University of Tokyo present on how they had a patient that was dying of leukemia, and they were treating her, but she wasn’t responding to the treatment. The team of doctors let IBM Watson look at the records.  IBM’s Watson system can learn the information in thousands of medical journals in a day, and then, when it’s provided with patient data, it makes recommendations.  In 10 minutes, Watson compared the leukemia patient’s genetic changes with a database of 20 million cancer research papers. It’s estimated that it would have taken two weeks for human scientists to identify which of the 1,000 changes were diagnostically important or not. Watson flew through the data. It turns out she did have leukemia but a different form, and it needed a different treatment. The new treatment put her in remission. Pretty powerful stuff!  (Link to story https://www.asianscientist.com/2016/08/topnews/ibm-watson-rare-leukemia-university-tokyo-artificial-intelligence/)

I believe companies that seek sustainable increased profits must look at their AI and analytics roadmap as a key component to achieving their goals.  Time is money and in health care it could be life.

I understand many of you have been struggling to get the results you expected with IBM Cognos BI or other BI solutions.  But, maybe you are going about it the wrong way.    Maybe you need to think bigger, more long term.  Try taking a step backwards and look at your business first.  What is one question, that if you could get the answer to, would significantly increase profits?   If distributors could get a better handle on inventory, what impact could it have on the bottom line?  If you are a law firm what if you could increase your realization rates by 10% by identifying the clients least likely to pay?  Get creative.  Ask others.  Then start to explore how you could pilot the idea using advance technologies.

It’s never too early to leverage data and analytics to increase profits and dominate your market!  IBM Cognos Analytics (BI) clients should plan for the future and how you will use artificial intelligence.

If you would like assistance starting your roadmap, or with IBM Cognos Analytics BI, email us at services@lodestarsolutions.com.