Velocity & Direction: AI and Analytics

Have you ever taken a few wrong turns and ended up right back where you started? Frustrating and a little embarrassing, if we're being honest with ourselves.

I'm tempted to ask which is more embarrassing for you: getting lost while using navigation apps or getting lost *because* you decided you knew better than the app? The question most folks are asking right now: how does this relate at all to AI and analytics?

With all the talk about agents, AI, analytics, it can be easy to get lost in the jargon. Let's pull it to something a little more concrete and I would wager a process that you have done before.

Ready for a quick road trip? (I promise, I'll relate this to analytics).

We first input our destination to the mapping app of choice. We get an overview of the trip from your current location to your destination. We hit "Navigate" and get turn-by-turn directions. Off we go, exploration and adventure awaits! But wait...traffic has starting to appear but it's all good -- we've been rerouted. But the route recommended goes through some terrain that isn't great for our old suspension on our well-traveled vehicle so we need to pull out to the broad overview map to see the big picture. We draft our new route customized to what we have, and before we know it, we've arrived!

Most of you have probably guessed where this is going by now.

- Destination = Business Objective

- Mapping App = Analytical Platform

- Overview = Strategic Analytics

- Turn by Turn = Ad-hoc Questions / Quiet Analytics

In the data to decisions journey, you need both the overview and the turn-by-turn directions. Strategic analytics often take the form of dashboards or scaled metrics across the business. These types of visual analytics provide a larger scale view than the ad-hoc questions seen in conversational analytics and the proactive, nudges that [quiet analytics](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/quiet-analytics-nudges-you-barely-notice-esther-schenau-199ec/?trackingId=QYUutzGv4it5IUISKLU2LA%3D%3D) ascribes to.

In a lively discussion over the phone and across the Pacific Ocean, Dr. Marco Motta brought up an excellent point: quiet analytics assumes high trust. Indeed, these numbers are quick and relatively frictionless. Their sheer unobtrusiveness also means we rarely challenge them unless we have a mental model that clearly conflicts.

This is where the benefit of dashboards comes into play. While more complex than chat, a well-designed dashboard provides more context and scope than ad-hoc answers from conversational analytics. The big picture can prompt you to think of a few other threads of thought to pull on rather than singularly focused on one question. When you think in multi-faceted ways, you create different paths of action and diversify your options on moving the business forward. That creativity is part of strategic thinking.

In the end, I think it's about balance for an organization. > Faster does not always equal better in this analytical journey! Velocity does not guarantee the correct direction—you don’t want to move quickly only to end up lost. But sometimes, you are very much constrained on time and cognitive energy. To steer an organization, we need to figure out how to balance scale, accuracy, performance, and relevance in this AI-infused analytics world. I look forward to seeing which analytical use cases AI can really accelerate when we utilize it intentionally.

First published here.