Sisense is forging ahead with its mission to make the results of business intelligence analysis available to everyone who can benefit from it. In summer this year they launched their Sisense Everywhere program, liberating BI from computer displays and interfacing with devices such as Amazon Echo and an IoT Lightbulb that displays different colors depending on the status of events. This liberation of BI has now moved on a step further with Sisense BI Bots. These use messaging channels such as Slack, Skype, Facebook Messenger and several others, to support users through two-way dialogues using instant-message conversations about data and analysis. The Bot helps users:
- Better understand data with on demand natural language analysis of a data set
- Interact with data directly or collaboratively in messaging threads in their preferred messaging applications
- Control the Sisense system like building an Elasticube or refreshing data
- Stay on top of important business events through integration with Sisense Pulse notifications, setting up smart alerts to track KPIs important to the user
- Be more prepared for meetings with calendar integration and smart data suggestions.
By providing relevant business insights right where the users ‘live’, the bot eliminates the need to switch to another app and solicit information. This removes an extra step each time the user has a question, and provides them with instant access to their business context.
Sisense continues to build on advancements in AI, Machine Learning, IoT, and Virtual Reality to make it easier for professionals to understand their businesses. While data visualization and self-service technologies have made business intelligence more accessible to everyday employees, businesses still struggle with complexity and adoption. Advancements in new fields of technology are making it possible to naturally augment professionals with BI and increase productivity by helping people be more in touch with their data.
In effect Sisense is adding another layer of access to BI analysis, and as such making BI available to a much wider audience. Fortunately the company is not pushing the line that BI users need to be sat in front of a computer display to access the results of analysis – some people need to do that, but many don’t. It is a fairly unique initiative, and will be attractive to businesses trying to figure out how to get the results of analysis into the hands of the people who can benefit most from it.