How Artificial Intelligence assisted BI can Move Your Organization up the BI Maturity Curve

By Rick Miller, Deltek Costpoint Product Director

You may ask if Business Intelligence (BI) applications are so smart, why do I have to create all my reports, charts, and data mappings from scratch? Shouldn’t BI be able to understand my large volumes of data and give me some answers? 

In Costpoint 8.0, Business Intelligence is getting smarter by leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing to help in the quest to understand data with BI tools.

Costpoint Business Intelligence is our new name for Costpoint Enterprise Reporting and it is much more than a name change. Rather than focusing mainly on creating reports, it will introduce many key new features that will take you to the next level of BI, leveraging Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence is defined as a computer system that can perform human tasks. Business Intelligence is a technology that collects and organizes data and provides tools for analyzing that data.  Putting AI on top of BI will allow us to reduce the time spent on analytical tasks, removing human bias.

To help understand the concept of AI-assisted BI, let’s think about how these terms can relate. As you’ve heard over and over, everyone’s data is getting bigger, it’s big data this and big data that. But as our data grows, it becomes harder for humans to analyze all that data on a regular, consistent basis without bias and without missing something. AI tools, when applied to the intentions of BI, can more efficiently scour the data for trends, relationships, and anomalies that humans might miss.

Here are some of the key areas where the addition of AI will help you in Costpoint BI 8:

AI Assistant: Type or input a question into a “chat-like” window and the system will automatically recommend relevant visualizations for use in Dashboards and Stories.

Data Exploration:  Performs key driver analysis on your data, i.e., how one field can predict the value of another field. These relationship diagrams will help you visually understand your data with interactive charts that can create additional visualizations

Natural Language Generation: Automatically creates verbiage to show observations that the AI has of your data, for example, trends, averages, and outliers

Data Preparation: AI can make data modeling easier by understanding the types of data and creating a model to organize and build the data model for you, so it’s ready to use to create reports, dashboards, and data explorations.

Deltek will be introducing Smart AI content with each release starting with Costpoint BI 8. This content will focus on specific areas of a project-based organization and provide pre-built data models and analytics to leverage the AI capabilities out of the box.

Be sure to register for Deltek’s Virtual Insight 2020 to learn more about what’s to come!

Here are a few ways to get the latest Costpoint 8 news:

• Costpoint Townhalls
• Deltek Virtual Insight 2020
• Deltek Learning Zone
• The Costpoint Product Blog