Stories is a business intelligence platform that tells you what you need to know. This is quite different from traditional BI platforms where we have to discover the things that are important for us to know. The name of the product reveals the way it works. Instead of presenting a blank canvas and expecting us to discover meaningful facts, Stories discovers the most important facts hidden in your data and presents them as stories. Typically this might be facts concerning trend deviations, hidden relationships in the data, threshold breaches, simple count anomalies, comparisons between different time windows, and several other types of fact.
Stories will present users with the most important things that are currently happening in your business. Each item in the list is literally a brief description of a particular issue. A story can be assigned to users who can follow its progress and add tasks and goals. Users can also drill down to the data detail to see exactly what is happening.
The logic in Stories surfaces the most significant stories automatically. The significance of a story depends on a number of factors – the percentage change, the absolute change, typical variance as well as context (what is happening in the rest of the company). All the factors are analyzed by the graph-based AI. It also collects user feedback about the presented stories to improve the suggestions. Power users have the ability to fine tune the algorithms through configuration parameters, but this is not be necessary for the majority of business users.
The analytic engine required to deliver this level of functionality is obviously very sophisticated, employing some measure of artificial intelligence to sort through large amounts of data and deliver items of interest.
Stories joins the contemporary move to natural language generation (NLG) as a means of communicating information in a succinct manner. However the real differentiator is the graph based AI powering the discovery of patterns in very large amounts of noise. This product is certainly worth looking at, for its innovative approach if nothing else.