AI widening data analytics opportunities

As artificial intelligence (AI) makes data analytics more readily available to customers, the opportunities for channel partners working in that part of the industry are widening.

The analytics industry is evolving to meet the challenge of providing real-time insights to users across organisations, and partners are seen as crucial to getting those tools into the hands of users.

Southard Jones, chief product officer at Tableau, has seen the industry develop, accelerated by the integration of more AI, and is keen to get its channel working with customers to encourage the wider adoption of data analytics tools.

He said the analytics industry had gone through changes, from visualisation to self-service to the latest focus on AI, and within that, there were a couple of areas where the industry was looking to offer further innovation.

“A lot of folks are excited about a couple of different things. One is the concept of conversational analytics. I can literally speak into my phone and ask a question of data, and I can get a response back, I can type it in, and that means more people now have access to data, which is great,” said Jones.

He added that the second area was around bringing improved real-time insights to people across the business, deepening their knowledge and exposing them to fresh findings without the need to ask.

The final trend was the changing semantics around data analytics, which made it easier for users to ask, find and react to information.

“For many, the hard part of analytics isn’t necessarily the insight. It’s getting the data from wherever it was into a logical meaning. We have identified that pipeline and created some kind of semantic layer, which is a logical definition of how you speak and talk. We use semantics to make that happen automatically, and that enables businesses to move much faster from raw data to an insight.”

Jones said the ability to use normal language was key to unlocking more data insights and opening up analytics to more users across a business.

“If you ask an agent to ask questions of raw data, you don’t get very good responses. You get [around] 50% accuracy, and that’s not very good. If you ask an agent to ask questions in a semantic way, you can get [around] 90% accuracy. So, we’ve identified the path from data to semantics, enabling them to get that faster,” he said.

Jones said partners were a key route to market, and as it became easier for customers to access data, the opportunities would increase for its channel.

“Tableau, for a long time, has been very partner-centric, a go-to-market model and enablement model, especially here in the UK,” he said, adding that the channel has the skills to educate, deploy and support customers.

“From the big SIs [systems integrators] to the very regional-specific SIs, to perhaps those who are very specialised in an industry, maybe financial services or wealth management or the healthcare or public sector, each of those partners has a unique thing they can bring to our customers,” he said.

This year was meant to be the year of AI project deployment, after 2024 was spent evaluating, but the roll-out of AI agents will continue into the next 12 months and beyond.

“We’re going to have many years of deployment. I think what you’re going to see is this is the year where people get deployments that are successful. I think last year was a lot of evaluations ... prototypes or POCs [proofs of concept]. I think you’ll see people are realising that there are certain use cases where agents are really, really good,” he said.

“People start finding those use cases, and they will make deployments this year and even into next year. Then, in following years, the agents will get better, the technology will get better, and some of those use cases that weren’t so good will start to get better – because there are just so many, if you think about all the things we do that are manual and administrative,” he added.