Decisionmakers love dashboards. Source: Shutterstock

Decisionmakers love dashboards. Source: Shutterstock

Why big data, IoT, and AI flourish when supported by visualizations

WE LIVE IN a digital world where every action and transaction generates data.

From booking a cab to go to work to paying for coffee at a Starbucks outlet, customers and businesses together generate petabytes (or more) of data every day.

In fact, with the internet of things (IoT) in the picture, there’s even more data that is generated and stored, from actions that traditionally would remain offline.

Thanks to wearable devices and embedded sensors, we live in an entirely digital, data-driven world today.

All of that data can help create plenty of interesting insights for companies — often in real-time — using artificial intelligence (AI).

In fact, once organizations audit their data and optimize their data streams, they’ll be able to leverage it to transform not just their operations but also the experiences they provide to customers.

All that “big data”, powered by IoT and fed into AI models, is not going to go very far in the corporate world, unfortunately, unless it is supported by visualization tools to help decision-makers make business decisions with a certain degree of confidence.

Visualizations are incredibly effective to help influence managers as it helps them spot trends that AI algorithms might not be trained for and allows them to make decisions in ways that they’re used to — with a lot more confidence as they now have a lot more data to support them.

Decision-makers love dashboards

Data is gearing up to drive the world forward, it’s touted as the new oil — but human beings, no matter how gifted, are unable to make decisions based on raw data.

Raw data doesn’t pain a complete picture because it just talks about one particular aspect of a transaction. When grouped together, combed, and matched with other streams, “big data” paints a vivid picture of what is going on.

It’s this data-pairing and “manipulation” that AI models can be trained for, to rinse all the data from the myriad sources, in real-time, to continuously feed into visualizations — on dashboards — to help decision-makers.

Despite the cliché, dashboards are incredibly useful because they allow managers to not only see what’s most relevant to them but also drill-down on trends they see.

Dashboards, when fuelled by all of the latest data and smart AI capabilities, can unleash the true creative potential of managers, helping them spot trends and patterns that no amount of training can prepare machine learning for.

Truth be told, in order to really flourish and get the stamp of approval of managers, big data, IoT, and AI projects will need to “dashboard-ify” results for easy, immediate, and effective consumption.