How *Some* CEOs are Extracting Gold From Their Data

By Kathy Leake, Founder & CEO, Crux Intelligence

I recently wrote an article for Fast Company which illustrates how some CEOs are getting it right in this new AI-powered, remote-working, brave new world with data at their fingertips. 

While, let’s be honest, others are still in the pre-pandemic control phase, wondering when their direct reports will press send on the email with an Excel attachment. 

Those CEOs might also be expecting their divisional managers to return to their desks IRL too soon. 

Hmmm. 

They might be waiting a very long time for that to happen. 

The Business Case for AI

It was fun coming up with scenarios to demonstrate the business case for AI-powered co-pilots. I didn’t have to go far for inspiration, but I hope you enjoy them.  

On a more serious note, as the Founder and CEO of Crux Intelligence, I am bullish on AI, but also deeply pragmatic about what it can actually do. There’s an enormous amount of “blue-sky” futuristic thinking around right now. Which is why I enjoy demo-ing our own software. AI can do a lot – but only with the right training, monitoring, data normalization, ingestion tools and so on. 

But when that works seamlessly, it’s amazing how much more productive you can be. Our augmented business intelligence dashboards allow you to make the best decisions in a totally intuitive, human way, in real time, using voice and search. Natural language processing has come a long way in the past few years. Yet the really exciting stuff transpires when the built-in smarts start to auto-surface alerts around outliers, significant changes or trends in the data precisely when they occur, complete with driver and drill-down analysis. 

Next Gen AI

You probably use a voice-enabled assistant yourself to turn on the lights at your place, check the weather, and “Play Coltrane” to add to the evening’s ambiance. These are fairly routine requests at this point, working off the pre-programmed “If…Then” protocol of all networked devices. But augmented analytics and embedded intelligence can liberate us not only from physical work locations, but the old ways of doing business. We have got to pivot to the data looking out for us instead.    

If your data is locked up in disparate silos, it’s essentially useless on a day-to-day basis. Yes, you could draw on it to compile reports, but only if the data stores are interoperable in terms of format and nomenclature. If the data isn’t harmonized, the AI can’t ingest, tag, or categorize it. However, with a smart layer which integrates everything, and can then interrogate, extrapolate and interpret the data, you can do really cool things. 

Apparently, 73% of workers don’t want to return to the physical office (and a soul-destroying commute). Which means we’ve got to overhaul the world of work. To do that, we have to rethink everything. For example, did you know that more than 50% of office pros report spending more time searching for files than on work? Why? Because static information silos destroy productivity. If time is money, then a lot of both is getting wasted at work right now.   

What’s the fix? 

IMHO, you need your very own AI-powered augmented analytics co-pilot. And if you’re in the market for that – come talk to us, because that’s exactly what we build. To read more about “Extracting Gold From Your Data”, check out my article in Fast Company.