Can we fix the plague in analytics with AI? Every Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics vendor is integrating a form of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning algorithm (ML), and natural language generation (NLG) into their products. 'Augmented analytics', is the hot new topic and full of hype right now, but can it fix the fundamental flaw that has plagued BI tools for decades - adoption?

I often get asked why Yellowfin decided to go global. While the Australian market is relatively large, it’s also quite risk averse, which makes it a challenging market to sell into. While VC-backed software vendors have the benefit of selling to others within their VC family, as a bootstrapped startup we had to forge legitimate markets outside of Australia. We knew that we had to spread our wings to grow and expanding overseas quickly gave us the opportunity to sell faster.

Recently, I read why companies are failing in their efforts to become data-driven in the Harvard Business Review. It said that 72% of Chief Data Officers believe their organization doesn't have a data culture and 92.5% of them blame their people. But I think they’re wrong. The real issue is that people aren’t using the tools that their CDOs have bought for them. That means the problem isn’t with the users, it’s with the technology they’ve been given.

As analytics software vendors, we need to do something profoundly different to improve how business users access, consume, and interact with data.

Last year, Yellowfin changed the world of business intelligence and analytics with the introduction of Yellowfin Signals. We automated data analysis, removed dashboard dependency, and sped up the process where you would get alerted to the most important changes in your business data, just ask AeroEdge.

In Yellowfin 8 we introduced two new products, Yellowfin Signals, to automatically discover the most critical changes in your business as they happen, and Yellowfin Stories, to provide context to the numbers and tell compelling stories with your data. We’ve received great feedback since then and implemented some of the requested enhancements to improve the user experience, increase governance and performance.