Unlocking Business Insights: How AI Transforms Data into Actionable Strategies

For instance, if we find that 80% of customers who buy diapers also purchase formula milk, that's an insight driven by data analysis. With this knowledge, you could offer formula milk to anyone purchasing diapers in an online store or place it next to the diaper aisle in a physical store. Further data analysis can then track whether this leads to increased sales.

Most business professionals understand similar decision-making systems based on data. However, many such insights come from simple queries on databases based on basic mathematical operations for aggregating results. Essentially, this type of insight is obtained as an answer to very straightforward questions.

But what if you want to know, for example, what your customers think about your brand and whether they are satisfied with your services? These are much more complex questions and cannot be answered with simple database queries. This is another scenario where AI can be of great assistance.

Great Wolf Lodge (GWL), a chain of indoor water parks, wanted to know whether a visitor would likely be a promoter, neutral, or speak negatively about a GWL location. Traditionally, this could be achieved by surveying customers with a question like, "How likely are you to recommend us to your friends on a scale of 1 to 10?" Each answer would place the customer into a group of promoters, neutrals, or detractors.

Instead of explicitly asking visitors this question, GWL decided to implicitly extract this information using their AI system called GAIL - Great Wolf’s Artificial Intelligence Lexicographer. GAIL analyzes large amounts of free-form customer comments and determines the likelihood that a client will be a promoter, neutral, or dissatisfied. Essentially, GAIL reads the comments and classifies each visitor’s opinion.

If these free-form comments were analyzed manually, it would require substantial human resources for classification. Instead, GAIL uses a Natural Language Processing (NLP) system that can classify the free text in a comment in seconds. NLP is a branch of AI that deals with the automatic processing and understanding of human language.

Systems like GAIL are becoming increasingly popular today. The questions that you, I, or any business seek answers to are becoming more complex. Additionally, the data from which we can derive answers is becoming more scattered, unorganized, and noisy, especially with the rise of social media and cloud computing. Fortunately, with the help of AI, we can navigate these complex data lakes to extract valuable insights, all without the need to spend vast amounts of money, time, and human resources.