AI and Analytics: Bringing the Human Front and Center

It is quarter close. Your sales leader is asking you every other minute, “where are we against quota?” You're refreshing data, sweating. You run into a snag and need to reach out to an analyst.

“Nick, how do I get this data? I need it for leaders. We may not hit our numbers.”

The pressure is on.

What does Nick do, our fictitious business analyst? He goes into some portal and types up the query needed.

SELECT

o.opportunity_name AS deal_name,

a.account_name AS account,

t.territory_name AS major_area,

o.netnewacv AS deal_size,

o.optistage AS stage

FROM optitable AS o

LEFT JOIN accounttable AS a

ON o.accountnumber = a.account_number

LEFT JOIN territorytable AS t

ON o.territory_sysid = t.sysid

WHERE sales_quarter = current_quarter;

What a mess.

For those that don't know, that is SQL, Structured Query Language. It is our seemingly advanced way of retrieving the data we need from our various systems, but in the age of AI, it is obsolete. What was once advanced is now our biggest hindrance. Sound familiar? In the software world, this is the norm.

Tell me, when was the last time you spoke to anyone in that matter of language? Never. It is not natural to us humans to speak the language of computers, but computers have become so ubiquitous and powerful that they've forced us to speak their language.

What AI represents is a move to naturalize our interacting with computer systems. Gone will be the days when we need a specialized analyst or user interface to get the data we need to inform the decisions we want to make.

Be it an AI chatbot that responds to a sales leader's every last whim, or an augmented agent to book our much-needed respite in the Caribbean, far away from our data-hungry leaders.

The age of AI promises to bring the naturalness of speaking the languages we know best to the system that know us best.

Maybe one day we would say.... if only humans understood natural language like AI could ;)