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Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence Trends 2024

By TechDogs Editorial Team

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Overview

If we had to list our favorite movie with a secret message for businesses, it would be the 2008 heist drama, 21. Surprised we didn’t go with a better-known movie? Well, this movie is based on a true story about a brilliant MIT undergrad, Ben Campbell, who joins the Ivy League institution as a normal teenager. However, Ben then joins a blackjack group, led by his math professor, that aims to rake in winnings using card-counting and mathematical analysis.

The movie takes it to the next level and shows how the students and their math professor start succeeding at casinos – simply by mentally calculating probabilities and making quick-fire decisions at the table. Moreover, the team had to remember every card they had on hand, keep track of the cards they had played, communicate with team members on other tables and also analyze the probability of winning a hand to make the right moves. Woah, that sounds super exhausting even reading about it!

While most of us aren’t bona fide math geniuses like Ben Campbell, the truth is, we need to do the same for businesses: making quick-fire decisions by remembering and keeping track of every data-based insight and communicating them to team members so they can analyze and react accordingly. Well, to do this in an increasingly competitive world, you need to know what’s the latest in the world of data, insights and intelligence.

Presenting – the top 5 Business Intelligence Trends of 2024!

Data is an increasingly valuable business asset. Wait, you knew that already?

Let’s skip ahead to 2024! Just like previous years, this year too, companies will demand more streamlined business intelligence operations that lead to improved customer offerings and optimized strategic data approaches. Only by storing, transforming, ingesting and analyzing data in the best possible way can businesses improve their operational efficiency. Whether it is internal business data, IoT device reading, consumer preferences or social media engagement stats. #DataIsData

With so much diverse data, businesses need to be aware of emerging trends that will affect the business intelligence landscape this year to give them a competitive edge. Last year, these came in the form of Real-time Business Intelligence (RTBI), large-scale data centers, analytics-as-a-service, data warehousing and data story-telling. So, how can businesses put the best foot forward in 2024?

If you ask us, the first step is to know about the hottest and the latest in the world of Business Intelligence. We mean, that’s why you’re here, right?

So, without further ado, let’s explore the top 5 Business Intelligence Trends of 2024!

Trend 1: Adoption Of Generative AI Will Lead To Generative Business Intelligence

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We bet you knew this one already: Artificial Intelligence will significantly impact the Business Intelligence landscape in 2024. How businesses approach their BI initiatives, that is gathering, analyzing and leveraging data will undergo a revolutionary change, thanks to the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI).

Soon, data analytics platforms will be driven by AI, leading to advances in accessibility to sophisticated, real-time insights. This will empower firms to make smarter decisions more quickly and regularly. Applications of AI, such as neural networks are enabling highly accurate AI-powered insights that automate data analysis. Furthermore, adaptive AI systems will offer businesses a decision-making framework that evolves with real-world changes, supports faster analytics and leads to more informed decisions. Think of OpenAI’s viral AI chatbot, ChatGPT, that can be leveraged to speed up decision-making in the business ecosystem. In fact, it has already created a new term: generative BI (Generative AI + Business Intelligence)!

The adoption of generative AI tools in business intelligence will automate the creation of tailored insights, predictions and visualizations, making BI insights more accessible, intuitive and easy to use for decision-makers. Generative BI, or generative artificial intelligence applied to business intelligence, will lead to a no-code BI approach. This will lead to advanced analytics features, making it easier to get relevant, personalized insights. “Its integration with industry-specific platforms means everyone in the business can get up and running right away. You can gain valuable insights about your customers, share this knowledge with colleagues and make more informed decisions to drive growth and success,” says Giovanni Cugliari, VP Product at iGenius, an AI-driven data business.

TechDogs’ Takeaway: While most of us have already hopped on the GenAI train, to leverage this trend, businesses must ensure that their enterprise data is clean and consistent to maximize the AI's potential. Further, business leaders must choose AI tools and platforms that align with their BI goals. For instance, they need to decide what is more critical for their BI outcomes: analyzing large amounts of historical data to identify patterns or making predictions about future events based on historical data. Finally, businesses should use generative AI to create tailored reports and dashboards for different users and designations in their BI pipeline, so relevant insights reach every stakeholder to enhance their decision-making.

Trend 2: Natural Language Processing Will Make Data Discovery And Visualization Simpler

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Most major enterprises are actively mining their data for insights, patterns and hidden trends to make the best possible decisions. However, the challenge of communicating these insights to non-technical stakeholders in the business ecosystem remains. So, in 2024, businesses will deploy cutting-edge natural language processing (NLP) solutions to make data discovery more effective, simple and accessible.

NLP or natural language processing, a subset of AI technology, enables computers to understand, interpret and generate outputs in human language. It will be a critical component of BI platforms to extract valuable insights from unstructured data sources, including social media posts, customer feedback, support requests, etc. In fact, Gartner says that by the end of 2024, over 75% of businesses will implement solutions based on natural language processing.

A prime example of NLP’s capabilities is the ‘Ask Data’ tool within Tableau, a business intelligence, analytics and visualization software. This feature allows users to simply type in a query and get visual and textual responses – no technical skills required! Moreover, NLP features such as autocorrect and named entity recognition will ensure accurate user intent is captured, so the output can be tailored to the user’s query.

Dave Menninger, senior vice president and research director at Ventana Research validates this trend, saying, “NLP capabilities are advancing quickly as evidenced by all the interest in ChatGPT. I saw a demonstration of Oracle Analytics' capability to generate a podcast with the observations it gathered from the data. Workers can listen to the podcast as they are commuting to work or as they are on their way to visit a client.” Wow, imagine knowing every key highlight from a report before stepping into the office premises!

TechDogs Takeaway: To leverage NLP technologies in Business Intelligence, organizations must ensure the data collected from various sources is cleaned and structured, enabling the NLP platform to successfully extract meaningful insights from it. Moreover, by enabling sentiment analytics and real-time feedback, businesses can respond to trends and customer issues proactively based on the NLP platform’s summarization. Finally, using NLP in BI will only be successful if the NLP algorithms are not just automated to generate reports and summarize data but tailored to provide stakeholders with quick, concise and actionable insights.

Trend 3: Multi-cloud Strategies Will Be Key In Getting Real-time Business Intelligence Insights

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The latest trend in data management is “the cloud,” as most businesses want to leverage the advantages of cloud computing. In 2024, the adoption of multi-cloud will become a key driving factor in enabling real-time BI insights. How, you ask?

Well, a multi-cloud approach involves leveraging multiple cloud service providers to store, manage, cleanse, analyze and transport data and insights. This hybrid cloud approach ensures businesses have scalable storage and computing that’s necessary for robust BI. With cloud workloads becoming the norm in business intelligence, we will see a major adoption of multi-cloud ecosystems in 2024. According to 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud, Hosting & Managed Services, Vendor Evaluations 2020 survey, 76% of businesses are using two or more public clouds. Enterprises with a valuation of over $1bn are twice as likely to be using three or more clouds than a smaller business, showing a preference towards multi-cloud.

For instance, businesses could use Amazon Web Services (AWS) for data storage, Google Cloud Platform for analyzing the data and Microsoft Azure for integrating AI in the BI workflow. This hybrid cloud strategy harnesses the strengths of several cloud providers and reduces the risk of vendor lock-in. IBM CEO Arvind Krisha validates this trend by saying, “Hybrid cloud offers more value than relying on a singular public cloud. It enables organizations to drive business value across multiple clouds, on-premises or at the edge. This includes scale, security, ease of use, flexibility of deployment, seamless experiences and faster innovation cycles.” Hence, in 2024, business intelligence workloads are expected to be streamlined by a hybrid cloud approach that leverages several cloud providers.

TechDogs’ Takeaway: For businesses adopting multi-cloud or hybrid cloud approaches, data governance is of utmost importance as it will ensure compliance and compatibility between multiple cloud platforms. This will be crucial in enabling accurate and reliable data-driven insights. Secondly, businesses must transition to cloud-native Business Intelligence tools such as AWS QuickSight, Azure Power BI, Google Data Studio, etc. to fully take advantage of cloud scalability. Lastly, businesses need to deploy technologies such as Kubernetes to enable seamless data portability between cloud platforms, enhancing insight sharing and reducing the chances of vendor lock-in.

Trend 4: Collaborative BI Will Redefine The Business Intelligence Landscape

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One of the most important aspects of any business operation is collaborative efficiency. As businesses are doing away with segregated and siloed data environments, collaboration and communication between business intelligence stakeholders will improve their efficiency. Known as Collaborative Business Intelligence, this approach enables employees across the organizational hierarchy to exchange insights, share cloud-based BI workloads and collaborate on analytics, improving the overall decision-making.

For instance, Microsoft Fabric offers a unified, multi-cloud analytics platform that combines several BI tools and features under one umbrella, that encourages users to collaborate within the platform. In fact, one study by Aberdeen found that companies that excel at collaborative BI saw a 42% improvement in productivity as employees weren’t spending as much time searching for information or sending emails. Moreover, they saw a 30 percent improvement in the efficiency of business processes/tasks!

Collaborative BI can also leverage social media-like networking technologies to boost communication and decision-making. With collaboration along various touchpoints, businesses can enhance cross-functional understanding and pave the way for shared knowledge that drives innovation and problem-solving in BI tasks. Furthermore, this approach is particularly relevant with the rise of remote work, enabling remote stakeholders to collaborate effectively irrespective of their location.

TechDogs Takeaway: Businesses looking to enhance their BI operations need to look no further than collaborative BI strategies this year. To achieve collaborative BI, business leaders must cultivate an organization-wide mindset that values data as an asset as well as encourage stakeholders to actively use data for day-to-day decision-making. Next, businesses must realign their organizational hierarchies to ensure cross-functional teams and workflows that allow sharing of data and insights in real time. Only then can businesses experience collective problem-solving and growth. Finally, the adoption of user-friendly collaboration and communication platforms will allow for real-time data and insight sharing.

Trend 5: Training And Upskilling Will Reduce The Skill Gap In Business Intelligence

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In 2024, most business leaders will focus on enhancing BI initiatives by reducing the skill gap. After all, businesses need to retain and onboard data-literate workers to assist in understanding how to gather, analyze, transform and leverage business data to the best of their abilities. Hence, business leaders will prioritize training and data upskilling to enhance their BI operations in 2024.

The term “data literacy” has become an essential pillar for successful business intelligence. On the other hand, poor data literacy has become a significant roadblock as it leads to sub-par BI outcomes. Hence, in 2024, senior stakeholders will invest increasingly in training and upskilling BI professionals, both old and new, to make data literacy a norm across the organization. This will also allow them to upskill their workforce in terms of disruptive technologies, such as generative AI (Trend 1) and other in-demand skills in the data-driven economy.

Miro Kazakoff, Senior Lecturer, at MIT Sloan, says, “In a world of more data, the companies with more data-literate people are the ones that are going to win.” A study by Forrester Consulting outlines the same, showing that 87% of employees rated basic data skills as “very important” for their day-to-day operations. However, only 40% of employees felt they had the data skills they were expected to have. Another study conducted by Accenture said businesses lose an average of 43 hours per employee annually from data-induced procrastination. So, training/upskilling workforces will help in bridging the skill gap in business intelligence and lead to better BI outcomes.

TechDogs Takeaway: Businesses have been trying to inculcate a culture of EdTech and business-related upskilling in recent times. With the trend now emerging in the BI realm, senior stakeholders must encourage their teams to pursue BI certifications to stay current with data skills. Moreover, businesses can ensure an upskilled data literate workforce through gamified approaches, that lead to higher productivity and faster data analytics. Finally, upskilling needs to start by identifying the key skills gap and ensuring that training/upskilling initiatives align with the needs of BI professionals.

Conclusion

The rapidly evolving landscape of Business Intelligence (BI) is more exciting than ever! As we move into 2024, a myriad of technological advancements will reshape the way businesses collect, analyze, interpret and act on data, which will redefine the realm of business intelligence. To keep up, businesses must stay up-to-date on the latest trends and breakthroughs. The areas where we can expect to see continued innovation and investment in BI include integration of Gen AI and NLP, multi-cloud strategies, collaborative BI and upskilling for data literacy. Focus on these trends and we bet your business intelligence will be more intelligent than ever in 2024!

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Tags:

Business Intelligence (BI) Generative AI Natural Language Processing (NLP) Business Intelligence Upskilling Collaborative BI Multi-cloud BI Artificial Intelligence (AI) Data Literacy Business Intelligence Trends Data Visualization

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