We’ll get to Decision Intelligence in a minute. First let’s talk about a case scenario.
STIB – the Brussels bus company was once faced with a problem. They noticed it was costing them way more money to keep their fleet on the road than it’s supposed to. And they found a reason behind it – or that’s what they considered was the problem which is – the cowboy bus drivers. Driving all so aggressively, harsh on the gas and brakes leading the company to spend tons on maintenance.
And while trying to figure out the ways to bring down the cost of maintenance they came across a relatively newer form of problem identification and decision-making framework named – Decision Intelligence (DI), that changed their life. And guess what the real problem was?
They looked into the data through the lens of DI and surprisingly, found it had nothing to do with the drivers – it was the city itself. It was the terrain and the geography of the city wearing out the buses with time, causing the company that extra expenditure.
While they had an entirely different hypothesis they started with, it was Decision Intelligence that helped them figure out the real problem and eventually a solution for it. So what exactly is this Decision Intelligence, you may wonder?
Decision Intelligence is the most cutting-edge form of analytics today. It brings together the best of applied data science, social science, and managerial science into a unified field that helps managers harness the power of data and improve their business and the world around them. And it’s poised to replace business intelligence.
How Does Decision Intelligence Work and Why is it Having a Moment Now
Decision Intelligence is a relatively new discipline that came into talks and gained more industry attention recently, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic and digital disruption continue to magnify the complexity of both business problems and decision-making processes.
DI sits on top of the same data warehouses and same data fabric you have today and uses existing models you have in place. Decision intelligence technology is a combination of existing technologies, AI and process automation, with the ability to do more than any of them individually. One key element to DI is a new form of AI called Contextual Intelligence which incorporates real world context into every analysis to succeed in generating actionable recommendations.
It enables business decision making at three levels:
- Decision support – in which machines provide some basic tools to support human decision making, such as alerts, analytics and data exploration.
- Decision augmentation – machines analyze the data and generate recommendations and predictions for human decision-makers to review and validate.
- Decision automation – the stage that further reduces the human involvement needed in the decision process where machines perform both the decision step and the execution step autonomously.
So here, what Decision Intelligence does is, it combines various decision-making techniques with AI, ML, contextual intelligence, and automation to generate actionable and specific business recommendations that can be immediately acted upon to create business value. And in turn, solving the last mile of analytics challenge.
The Benefits of Decision Intelligence for Businesses in Bangladesh
Although it’s still relatively new to the industry, even more so in Bangladesh, we can always aim to keep pace with the tech trends. And below are four core benefits of Decision Intelligence solutions that businesses in the country can leverage if introduced to the market:
- Data-driven decisions: To get a competitive advantage, it’s very important to correctly analyze the available data, make some predictions, and choose the best option. AI can manage the data array and find invisible patterns and possible anomalies that can significantly influence the outcome.
- Faster decisions: DI systems speed up the process of decision-making as much as possible since they are able to process huge amounts of data almost instantly.
- Multiple problem-solving: AI-powered decision-making algorithms can also be quite flexible and highlight several outcomes of a certain decision when one of the parameters is changed.
- Mistakes and biases elimination: There are at least five types of biases that can directly influence the business decision outcomes. Decision intelligence allows avoiding them all since the correctly programmed algorithm takes an ultimately objective look at the available data.
However, do smart systems always make better decisions than humans? Although they are guided by large volume of input data and aren’t prone to cognitive biases, they still need human verification, especially in the cases when the decision made can lead to conflicts of interest and values.
Having said that, Decision Intelligence still holds a potential to revolutionize the way we make decisions as businesses and make our lives easier. Managers looking to make big leaps or gain great competitive advantages have to be aware of how Decision Intelligence can change the decision-making process for good.
