By Michael Scheibach
“We have entered the next phase in the evolution of
data analysis, which we call ‘narrative analytics.’ This new phase of
data analysis in service of communication enables financial institutions
to accelerate understanding and decision-making, improve customer
interactions, and elevate human productivity, at a speed and scale never
before possible.”
Brave new world? Mission impossible? Not according
to Kris Hammond, who is quoted above. Hammond is the chief scientist for
Narrative Science (www.narrativescience.com),
a Chicago-based company dedicated to bringing the power of artificial
intelligence to the business world, including banks. The company’s
mission is simple: to make people smarter by making machines smarter.
Its AI platform, called Quill, does just that by using data from
spreadsheets and dashboards to write reports indistinguishable from
those written by people.
At first glance, this may seem farfetched; however,
Hammond, who gave the keynote address at this year’s Payments
Conference, is very convincing. He accurately points out that we all
spend hours — too many valuable hours — entering data into spreadsheets,
such as Excel, then tediously reading and deciphering the data in order
to make what we consider to be well-thought-out and seemingly supported
decisions. For Hammond, this is an outdated and unproductive
methodology to make relevant and effective strategic business decisions.
Quill goes well beyond the spreadsheet and
visualization by analyzing the data for trends, correlations and
relationships; drawing inferences from the facts derived from the data;
and, finally, generating a plain English narrative that interprets and
explains the analysis specific to the requirements of a person, a team
or a company. Moreover, Quill can re-create analysis over and over at
great scale.
“The power of Quill,” said Hammond, “is that it can
make use of any sort of structured data to produce content, as long as
the data supports the conclusions that the system wants to draw. It is
also highly adaptable with regard to language use and focus. This means
that it can report on an organization’s operational concerns, using the
language and format appropriate for an executive decision-maker; and it
can provide reporting to a bank’s customers, using the language and
focus appropriate for each one. In fact, the same data can be used to
provide talking points for an investment advisor while also generating a
direct client communication that is more colloquial and succinct.”
As Hammond emphasizes, solutions using artificial
intelligence, such as Quill, serve as competitive equalizers in much the
same way that the Internet helped equalize companies 20 years ago
(i.e., a small company could create a website as sophisticated and
robust as a large company and, thus, equalize the competition). Hammond
believes AI technology will level the playing field for regional and
mid-tier banks by allowing them to leverage their existing data and
knowledge without being primarily dependent on capital and resources.
But are you ready to implement an AI solution such as Quill? Here are few reasons why you should:
- It provides the ability to scale high-quality human analysis and the interpretation of its findings to an unprecedented level.
- It can be configured to generate for different and specific audiences, from millions of people to an audience of one, from a single data set or multiple data sets.
- It does all of this at blinding speed — reducing the time from analysis to understanding, and communication from hours, days or weeks to less than a second.
“With
the way AI is accelerating into the business world,” said Hammond, “in
the next five years, any company not leveraging AI within its data
strategy will inevitably fall behind.”
Michael Scheibach is executive editor of BankNews magazine.
Copyright (c) October 2014.