AI-Enabled Analytics for Business

CHAPTER 2Why AI-Enabled Analytics Is Essential for Business

All models are wrong; some are useful.

—George Box¹

We are at the dawn of an era of digitization for business that requires on-demand continuous planning where human and artificial intelligence (AI) work hand in hand to achieve insights for better results from data-driven decisions. New software and cloud computing are making analytics more available, but is business adopting these new tools at a break-neck pace? Well, no! The adage “You can lead a horse to water, but can’t make him drink” is sadly applicable to many business experiments in analytics that have proven successful—but all too often are not sustained.

We will explore in subsequent chapters the impediments to analytics, but here our attention turns to why analytics is essential for business and why the executive must embrace the implementation of AI and analytics.

First, without analytics, the business cannot remain competitive and will be at risk of making decisions that fail to recognize market opportunities, ineffectively deploy capital, and misallocate staff resources to low-value efforts. Second, without analytics-based decisions, we as humans will continue to be inherently biased, which leads to under-optimized performance. Third, executives pursuing analytics have a better chance of being rewarded from improved business performance; those who do not risk being passed over. Accordingly, we will dive into the competitiveness, decision processes, ...