Traditional business intelligence involved employees poring over long lists of numbers and painstakingly transferring those numbers into a visual presentation. Thankfully, technology has made business intelligence vastly more accessible to any company. Most ERP systems now come with some sort of BI and reporting tool attached.

But AI has taken this advancement of technology to a whole new level. With AI, collecting and communicating business intelligence is almost seamless. Through its ability to take in and analyze vast quantities of information, AI can produce insights that would take humans hours upon hours of boring, tedious work. It all but eliminates manual errors and it provides a level of reporting detail that human-made reports rarely reach.

Let’s start out by looking at the benefits of AI within the realm of business intelligence.

Benefits of AI-Enhanced Business Intelligence

Harnessing AI in the realm of business intelligence can have many benefits for your company. Here are just a few of those benefits:

• Enhanced Efficiency: AI can enhance efficiency within business intelligence in many ways. For example, by automating data transformations across systems or formats, businesses can focus on strategy rather than spending time manually preparing reports. AI also reduces human errors, leading to more reliable analytics.
• Ease of Use: AI-powered chat interfaces allow users to ask complex data-related questions without needing coding expertise. This democratizes data access across organizations, empowering non-technical users to generate insights independently. It also streamlines internal communication, ensuring everyone has real-time access to crucial business metrics.
• Reduced Risk: AI can continuously monitor financial transactions and business operations to flag irregularities or issues before they escalate. Companies can use AI-driven risk models to assess the potential impact of various problems, improving overall governance.
• Enhanced Data Visualization: AI can generate data visualizations itself, saving employees hours of time making graphs. Taking this a step further, dynamic dashboards can update in real-time, reflecting the most current data for better decision-making. This fosters data-driven cultures within organizations, enabling leadership to act with confidence.
• Personalized & Adaptive Reporting: Using its personalization capabilities, AI can tailor reports based on individual job roles, displaying only the most relevant data for each user. This personalization enhances productivity by eliminating unnecessary information clutter. AI can also generate executive summaries that explain complex metrics in simple, digestible language, reducing the need for manual report writing. AI can even adjust the tone and detail level of its reports based on its audience (executives, analysts, or external stakeholders, for instance).
• Predictive Analytics: One of the biggest benefits of AI in business intelligence is its capability to create predictive analytics. Instead of just analyzing past behavior, AI-driven forecasting helps businesses anticipate market shifts and consumer behavior in the future. By recognizing subtle correlations in large datasets, companies can make informed decisions that maximize profitability. These predictive capabilities enable proactive responses, minimizing risks before they become costly.

As you can see, AI can level up a company’s business intelligence to a previously unforeseen level. It’s truly transformational.

The Importance of ERP Integration

Of course, for AI to analyze and report on your business data, it needs reliable, real-time access to that data. The best way to accomplish this goal is to implement an AI-enabled ERP like Epicor across all your business operations. With AI woven into the data flow of your company—its heartbeat, in a sense—your business intelligence will have complete visibility into the operations of every department. With access to such rich data presented in clear visualizations and reports, company leaders can make data-driven decisions with confidence.

To find an example of this kind of ERP in action, look no further than Epicor. Its AI business intelligence tools can optimize inventory forecasting, accounting for trends, intermittency, seasonality, and obsolescence. They can also improve financial forecasting, training itself on a company’s data and applying the most relevant financial models.

Ready to Access Transformational Business Intelligence with AI?

If you’d like to learn more about how AI and business intelligence work together, check out our recent blog on Epicor’s “cognitive ERP” principle. In that blog, you’ll discover the “why” of AI and how to implement it in the best way for your unique business.

Here at Laminin, we’re excited to help you explore the opportunities for transformation that AI offers companies like yours. We can help you choose, strategize, implement, integrate, and customize knowledge work automation and information management solutions such as Epicor. Contact us to get started—we’d love to hear from you!