Can data be really made to behave intelligently?

18th October 2023

Data is King. This is known. Data is Gold. Who will deny this? Captivating data using Data Mining and Data warehousing process. Who refuses to do this? What’s the big fun in that? If you have data, data has to be analysed to facilitate business processes. This too is correctly understood. Backed by digital revolution globally, organisations across the globe have heavily been dependent or so to say influenced by data driven inferences, impact of which is felt by many across the globe.

Data now has emerged as a science and several tech driven tools have emerged. So are issues related to data protection, data integrity, data in cloud, data security, data based valuations, data analytics etc. So much so that data colonisation has emerged as a new paradigm for business strategy. The intense competition and corporate acquisitions are seen where data based valuation influence takeover valuation price. Even for some, investment decision in a business are strategically triggered by creating huge customer base backed data so that exit from the business is made on valuations of these customer base. We are witnessing many such takeovers where the basic pillar was huge database of customers/ clients.

Thus Data Analytics and Data Science are now hot topics that are influencing business transformation across the corporates world over. Data analysis is an age old phenomena being practised for several years since the days of Lotus 123 and dBase to Microsoft Excel. These certainly help in analysing data, interpreting them, retrieving these, process automation and at times business decisions. But digital revolutions have made several technology tools developed that made data analytics to emerge as an influencer in business decisions and business transformation.

Data Analytics differs from Data Analysis in one fundamental aspect. Analysis is not necessarily inference oriented to trigger a business decision. It may at times, but primarily focused to put data dashboards in a defined and organised manner as per user requirement. On the other hand, Analytics necessarily should be directed to present data in such a manner, using several tools and visualisation techniques, such that strategic decisions are facilitated. Stakeholders for analytics are generally top management and strategic owners. There is no point in investing in Analytics if that is not integrated with the strategic decision making process.

Fundamental question that remains is how data can be made to behave intelligently? Or at all these can be driven as such? In an era where Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) is a buzzword, even with school going students and social lives are getting impacted by AI driven digital influencers, undoubtedly AI influence on Data Analytics and the way data would behave are getting set. Will that mean that making data behave intelligently is already set?

Debate world wide is - can artificial intelligence score over human intelligence? Without participating in that debate as one in a billion, it is necessary to understand what AI is meant for. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are tools to analyse data and predict / present analytics as per ‘understanding’ of user requirements. Intelligence is drawn from data that purportedly claims to track the behavioural pattern of the user or the requirement of the user based on several data sets that are drawn from multivariate sources. As Old School of thought used to say about GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out), so applies to AI based inferences. AI is as good as data sets that it generates from multivariate sources and interpretation of user requirements. Here where the word “Intelligence” becomes debatable in the sense it projects. Latest example is - CHATGPT is as good as Prompts that are provided.

Having said these, AI tools remain to be very important tools for Data Analytics and can significantly influence informed business decisions. It has set the data characteristic and data science evolve in new Avtar. AI can make data behave intelligently based on ‘parameters’ set. But it cannot be conclusively made to proclaim that data behaviour is intelligent enough for the intended objective. Setting ‘Parameter’ analysing ‘Intention’ need strong human interface. But certainly enough to say that evolutions each day are making AI tools more Intelligent.