Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021.  Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Smart BI is accelerating thanks to AI and Intelligent Storytelling

By Chandrashekar Prasanna (LSP), Evangelist, Zoho

In the last few years, BI (business intelligence) has become an essential catalyst for business growth, and with COVID-19 impacting the acceleration of software technology, we see BI rapidly changing to fit the future of business. Aspects such as conversational analytics will gain more popularity and be readily adopted so that business users can simply ask questions in natural language and the engine will be able to understand and generate answers within seconds. Propelled by AI’s integration with BI, expect to see users with less technical backgrounds gaining analytic literacy in 2021.

Storytelling will build digestible narratives

Storytelling, also known as automated insights, will also help businesses in the coming year. Instead of users spending time determining which insights are more impactful for their business, intelligent storytelling will highlight key findings for them. The system will be able to track changes and build a narrative that’s digestible to the user and points to key findings. Storytelling will also be able to generate presentations automatically to eliminate tedious busy work. It is important to note that while storytelling will impact business in 2021, it will need to be adopted in a way where deliverability of insights will come from regularly used business tools, such as email or chat. Enabling storytelling to be accessible in these types of software tools will be a key component in driving the consumption of storytelling BI.

Embedded BI and self-service BI will gain momentum

Embedded BI and self-service BI are also on the forecast for rapid growth in 2021. With embedded analytics giving end users the ability to manipulate data, businesses will be able to generate advanced analytics, rather than static reports as seen in the past. Momentum around embedded BI adoption has been growing over the years and interactive filtering will be more common in the near future. Because of embedded BI, users will be able to create actionable insights, and business apps with analytical aspects will become more integrated. Additionally, self-service BI will provide businesses with AI enhancements to automate search-engine reporting, insights, augmented data preparation, unified business analytics, and more. It has become critical for businesses to have the ability to connect all data points so they can have a 360-degree view of business insights. Unified business analytics will prove to be an essential aid in that process.

Connected Cloud and Mobile BI

With COVID-19 and remote work accelerating cloud adoption, connected cloud will be a huge influence on BI in the year to come. Businesses will be looking for vendors that offer cloud-based BI that focuses on security. Additionally, some businesses will seek out vendors that offer either self-managed cloud networks or private cloud servers like AWS and Google Cloud, since not everyone will want to be on the public cloud. The adoption of the connected cloud BI will grow tremendously in the next year.

Additionally, mobile BI will prove to be more prevalent in 2021. Mobile BI will enable anywhere access to insights to work in harmony with a “work from anywhere” environment. While a limited screen size continues to be a challenge for mobile BI, specific mobile interfaces will become more prominent and will bring in aspects such as conversational capability to help drill down data further. For example, in terms of exploration, interactions such as reports and dashboards are going to become more common than previously seen. Mobile BI will continue to be essential in the future, but its popularity depends on leveraging technology to make the BI service more usable.

With the need for smart analytics growing, BI will only become more robust in the next year, making insights more digestible and accessible, even for those who do not have technical backgrounds.

##

About the Author

Chandrashekar (LSP) is a Zoho evangelist committed to creating and spreading awareness of Zoho. He cut his teeth in the software domain with the WebNMS division of Zoho and has journeyed with the company at its crucial pivot points. LSP is based out of Montreal and holds a masters degree in information systems and applications.