AI is nothing short of revolutionary when it comes to solving tricky problems. Anyone who has been using generative AI such as ChatGPT knows that it’s an order of magnitude more powerful than what went before. But as with any ground-breaking technology, AI takes some getting used to.
Traditionally, we develop software to carry out tasks based on our own assumptions and knowledge. Now, AI is using data to provide better answers to our problems. It’s still our data, but the power of AI is such that it can make more sense of it than a human can. AI's ability to provide more accurate, data-driven solutions to our problems and opportunities is incredibly powerful.
AI: A new approach
Let’s say your goal is to increase sales. Traditional marketing would tell you to define your target market using market research and then craft a message tailored to that audience. While this approach works, it’s not always straightforward and by necessity has to include some assumptions.
AI, on the other hand, uses a different approach: it sifts through large datasets, identifying the segments that are most likely to respond to your message based on past behaviour. And that’s the difference: AI doesn’t rely on what people say they will do; it looks at what they’ve actually done.
It’s not so different to what a market research expert once told me long after he had retired: "Look at what people do, not what they say." That’s precisely what AI does—it analyses historical data to provide insights that are grounded in reality, not assumptions.
Get started with AI with Microsoft Power BI
We tend to think of AI as being expensive and requiring teams of data scientists. In fact, Microsoft Power BI is a great way of getting started. It includes several powerful AI visuals: Key influencers, decomposition tree, Q&A, and Smart Narrative.
The Key Influencers visual uses AI to pinpoint the factors that influence the metric you're tracking. Whether it’s sales volume, net profit, or error rates, the Key Influencers visualization can help you identify what drives your key business outcomes.
What Problems Can Key Influencers Solve?
The Power BI Key Influencers visual works by analysing data to uncover the factors that either increase or decrease your chosen metric. Here's how it works in a nutshell:
- Identify your key metric – eg sales volume, customer satisfaction, or product defects.
- Gather relevant data – collect information on various factors that could impact your metric. This could include customer demographics, process efficiency, or external conditions.
Data can come from existing process or created for the project, such as:
- To increase sales – which customer demographics can you identify?
- To reduce errors – which data are you already monitoring? What could usefully be added?
- To increase productivity – which factors might impact employee performance that are already known?
Get your data in shape
For AI to work its magic, your dataset needs to meet certain criteria. Fairly obviously, there has to be some possible cause and effect between your data. There's no value in adding observations that do not influence your metric. In addition:
- Data may be continuous (numeric) or categorical but each row must represent a unique case.
- Data must be clean with no errors, duplicates or outliers that could skew the results.
- Get as much data as you can – AI thrives on large datasets. At an absolute minimum, Microsoft recommends having at least 100 observations for any one factor and at least 10 observations for comparison purposes. But large datasets give better results.
What do the results reveal?
The Key Influencers visual ranks the factors that influence your metric based on their influence, helping you quickly identify the most important drivers. But here’s where it gets really interesting: the AI doesn’t just stop at general insights—it can also segment the data to reveal deeper patterns.
For instance, it might show that "large companies" drive higher sales, which you might already know. But Key Influencers goes further by identifying more specific segments, such as "large companies in France’s textile industry" having a particularly strong impact on sales. These insights are tough to uncover manually, especially when dealing with large datasets.
Next steps: put AI to work
The Key Influencers visualization is just one of many ways that Microsoft Power BI can integrate AI into your business analysis. However, getting your data ready for analysis is crucial for success in any machine learning project.
At Anatec AI, we’ve got a ton of experience in data wrangling and data engineering, ensuring that your data is clean, structured, and ready for powerful AI insights. We also create semantic models and measures, so your data is in the right format for visuals such as Key Influencers. If you want to learn more about how we can help you unlock the full potential of Power BI’s AI features, don’t hesitate to get in touch for a chat.