Decision Intelligence is Going Mainstream: Seize the Competitive Edge as an Early Adopter
Decision Intelligence (DI) is rapidly emerging as a pivotal technology for companies aiming to enhance decision outcomes amidst the challenges of increasing data volumes, limited employee capacity, accelerated operational cycles, and growing complexity.
In recent weeks, multiple analyst firms have emphasized the significance of DI, highlighting it as a critical technology poised to deliver substantial benefits to organizations that embrace it. Analysts project that mainstream adoption will occur within the next 2 to 5 years, suggesting that by 2029, the majority of companies will have integrated DI into their operations. This could range from augmenting decision making with recommendations to fully automating decision execution, all in pursuit of superior organizational outcomes.
As DI deployment accelerates, early adopters stand to gain immediate advantages. These include real-time analysis of vast amounts of internal and external data and the ability to generate informed recommendations across all decision-making levels, from tactical to strategic. Companies leveraging DI will be better positioned to achieve their objectives, from enhancing customer satisfaction to optimizing revenue management, thanks to their ability to make faster, more informed decisions.
Gartner® outlines the need for DI platforms in its key findings in the 2024 Gartner Market Guide for Decision Intelligence Platforms:
“To improve decision quality, it is not enough to offer fragmented and non-context-specific, data-driven insights through business unit-level dashboards, data science predictions or a variety of other, siloed analytical and AI applications.”
They go on to define what a Decision Intelligence Platform is in the following graphic:
Aera Technology was recognized as a Representative Vendor in the 2024 Gartner Market Guide for Decision Intelligence Platforms. Additionally, IDC published the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Decision Intelligence Platforms 2024 Vendor Assessment, naming Aera Technology as a Leader.
We think this report further underscores the unique value of Decision Intelligence, particularly in how it distinguishes itself from other technologies particularly in regards to the collection and utilization of the data fundamental to making business critical decisions. Specifically, the IDC Marketscape states:
Traditionally, decision making would largely involve ensuring that decision-makers have access to the data that they need to make decisions, relying heavily on human interpretation of data while being aided by basic analysis. However, given the exponential growth in data, the fact that organizations make more complex decisions and on a more frequent basis requires organizations to seek solutions that will enable them to govern and orchestrate decision making at scale.
It is also important to understand that decision intelligence is different from business intelligence (BI) and artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML). In business intelligence, users can understand trends, outliers, and track metrics, while with AI/ML, it allows for predictive and pattern recognition capabilities. Decision intelligence incorporates different aspects of both BI and AI/ML but focuses on automating aspects of decision-making and based on the complexity of the decision will require humans in the loop.
This IDC Marketscape explanation is important. Taking the details a step further, it’s worth pointing out that existing technologies aggregate data between applications and serve it up in dashboards, with no improvements to latency and maintaining silos that limit access to information.
In addition, this approach requires time-consuming human intervention to review the data, make a decision, and execute the action to close the loop. Not only is this approach difficult to scale — it suffers from transparency, speed and accuracy limitations, and doesn’t consider or communicate the subsequent impacts to other parts of the business, creating organizational friction and risk for poor decision outcomes.
This is why the analyst community has projected an adoption horizon of 2-5 years, because solving these existing legacy problems can’t wait. Leading companies have recognized this, of course, resulting in many trying to build in-house solutions to achieve the flexibility, scalability, and accuracy necessary for modern decision making. Unfortunately, companies that have tried to build these capabilities in-house find that creating and maintaining these homegrown solutions is neither sustainable nor satisfactory.
The takeaway here is, now is the time to start your Decision Intelligence journey.
Aera Decision Cloud is built to deliver the results your company needs
Aera Decision Cloud is purpose-built to address the challenges mentioned above, providing the AI-driven capabilities necessary for optimal enterprise decision making. The platform enhances and automates decision making processes through its integrated components, including the Decision Data Model™, Aera Cortex™, Aera Skills™, and Aera Developer™. These tools empower organizations to create customized decision workflows tailored to their specific needs, ensuring seamless visibility, analysis, collaboration, and execution across all levels of the enterprise.
We are particularly proud to be recognized for best-in-class capabilities in Decision Design, Decision Engineering, and Decision Orchestration:
- Decision Design provides functionality for users to define business goals or desired outcomes, map decision-making workflows, including feedback loops and approval points, and identify choices and constraints that limit the available options of a decision maker.
- Decision Engineering provides functionality to organize the available data using semantic and/or ontological frameworks, analyze the data using a range of use case-specific methods that may include simulation, optimization, descriptive, and predictive analysis. The output of this process is a prioritized list of impact-weighted options that are either presented to a decision maker or can be fully automated by the platform.
- Decision Orchestration provides functionality to monitor all elements of the decision-making workflow (e.g., rules, algorithms, data sets, approval hierarchies, goals, constraints, decisions, and so forth) and enables their ongoing or periodic adjustment based on automated and human-generated feedback loops. Orchestration also enables ongoing learning about decision-making processes and outcomes of decisions by providing functionality to catalog and analyze these decision intelligence artifacts.
Which organizations will benefit from Aera Decision Cloud?
Aera Decision Cloud is purposefully designed to manage complex operations, generate recommendations, augment and automate a range of decision processes —from small and granular through large and strategic — delivering both a shortened time to value and increasing value over time for customers. Our platform is delivering millions of accepted recommendations for leading companies in CPG, life sciences, high tech, industrial manufacturing, higher education, and more.
How to get started
After reading the 2024 Gartner Market Guide for Decision Intelligence Platforms and the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Decision Intelligence Platforms 2024 Vendor Assessment excerpt, reach out to our team to learn more about starting your Decision Intelligence journey. We can help you begin to see results in approximately 4-6 weeks by understanding your unique needs and challenges, then providing:
- Recommendations for the most impactful use cases: Based on our work with many large, global enterprises, we and our partners can recommend the top use cases for your industry.
- Packaged skills and test drives: With Skills, Aera digitizes decisions and orchestrates systems across supply chain, procurement, finance, marketing and trade promotions, and more. We offer a number of packaged skills that you can deploy rapidly with an Aera Test Drive.
- Data harmonization and ingestion: The Aera Decision Data Model is designed to drastically reduce the time and effort spent on aggregating, harmonizing, and labeling datasets. Data is automatically refreshed in near-real-time – made possible by Aera’s patented Data Crawler technology and internet-scale data architecture.
To learn more about the benefits of Decision Intelligence, schedule your personalized demo today.
Gartner, Market Guide for Decision Intelligence Platforms, Erick Brethenoux, Pieter den Hamer, David Pidsley, Alys Woodward, Raghvender Bhati, Abed Ajraou, 18 July 2024.
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