How to Overcome the Barriers to AI and Predictive Analytics

You Don't Need a Data Scientist to Adopt AI and Predictive Analytics

If you're like a lot of finance and accounting leaders, you may be feeling the pressure to support the growing demand for the insights provided by AI and predictive analytics. Now more than ever, it's not enough to record historical data; we need to use the data we have to predict what may happen to better react and respond to changes. You don't need a Data Scientist to adopt the scalable, continuous analysis enabled by AI if you have the right tools.

The Struggle to Go Live Continues

Successful companies understand the importance and benefits of business intelligence in response to increasing volatility, uncertainty, and risk. Unfortunately, according to VentureBeat, a staggering 87% of data science projects never go live. What's worse, your job may now be on the line if your data science projects flounder. "AI is not going to replace managers,  but managers who use AI are going to replace those who don’t," said Deborah Leff, CTO for data science and AI at IBM.

"We’re starting to see that awakening of business leaders wanting to understand how machine learning works, and what AI really means for them, and how to leverage it successfully. And those leaders are going to be the most in demand," added Leff.

If the majority of projects never go live, what can you do to avoid being a statistic? The good news is that it's possible to make sense of the abundance of data and successfully implement AI if you can overcome these barriers. Luckily, we have the experience to help.

Barrier #1 - Expensive and Elusive Data Science Skills

With the right tools, you no longer have to rely on a data scientist to solve the complex problems you need to overcome to leverage your existing infrastructure and applications. A solution like UBIX, gives you the automation to assist with the critical process of identifying your data, creating an inventory of your data sources, and defining your analytic needs. With UBIX, you can:

• Easily spin up new instances and manage your analytic infrastructure.
• Manage the end-end AI lifecycle so you can finally bridge the gap between business users and insights.

Barrier #2 - Accessing and Transforming Data for Analytics

In order to analyze data, it must be collected. Can you even access your data? It's surprising how many companies today literally can't get access to their data files.

The other problem with data is that disparate data sources inevitably mean different data formats. Data almost always exists in multitudes of places and formats, including:

• structured and unstructured data
• video files, images, and/or text
• different servers or locations
• varying security and privacy requirements

It's easy to see why so many projects struggle from the start when so much data needs to be collected and cleaned. UBIX has made the heavy lift of collecting, aggregating, and normalizing your internal financial and operational data simple. UBIX enables you to combine your internal data with external information such as weather and commodity indices to derive actionable insights and foresight. You can profile, clean and transform your data and prepare it for data science in minutes, not hours or days.

Barrier #3 - Lack of Collaboration Prevents Adoption

Data science is quickly becoming a necessary part of business DNA. However, not all companies are used to or prepared to collaborate across cross-functionally. Now we all have to understand "How the Sausage Is Made" and can't simply throw a request at the data engineers.

It is possible to create a self-serve culture of business analysis with the proper tools. UBIX is specifically built as a single platform for problem solving which enables your data analytics solution to move to production quickly. And with automated workflows, your end-end AI lifecycle is continuously and constantly delivering timely, reliable foresight so you can take intelligent action.

Getting Started Is Easy

Contact the AI and predictive analytics experts at UBIX to move your analytic transformation forward. We help you solve specific business problems quickly and cost-effectively.

Contact us at 952-474-2834 today!

UBIX is a data science platform designed to democratize AI and allow business users and subject matter experts to solve complex analytic problems without relying on data scientists. UBIX manages the complete AI lifecycle by automating and scaling all the key tasks across the end-to-end data and analytics pipeline. We help enable users of all skill levels to contribute to the development of AI applications at scale. 

UBIX can be found on ERPVAR's website here - AI and predictive analytics and Acumatica Cloud ERP integration.