AI-Powered Business Intelligence

Preface

Pop culture has had a huge impact on the way we view AI. If there’s anything that sci-fi movies such as The Matrix and The Terminator have taught us, it’s that AI is out to get us and that AI has a human touch. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator showed us what an AI-turned-human could look like. From The Matrix, we learned that we might not even recognize that our lives are all controlled by a superior artificial intelligence.

While I think that both of these takeaways are problematic, I do believe they convey some truth in the context of business intelligence (BI). AI is coming to get us and it might have a human touch. But before we get into the details, let’s first clarify some key terms. What is BI, exactly? BI is difficult to define because it depends on who you ask, when, and in what context.

The definition of BI for the context of this book, however, is fairly straightforward. I define BI from a systemic point of view: business intelligence is a system or software that enables business users and analysts to look at data from multiple sources within an organization with the goal of making better-informed decisions. So when I refer to BI, this term is closely related to BI systems such as Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, and Looker, and the underlying infrastructures that run these systems.

Let’s take a quick look at AI, a term that we will explore in much broader detail in the course of this book. First, AI fuels all kinds of business processes today. More than 50% of ...