Diagnostic analytics are incredibly valuable for many organizations. With advances in data-driven decision-making, simply knowing what happened (descriptive analytics) is table stakes. Understanding “why” changes are occurring leads to better analytical outcomes. However, leveraging diagnostic analytics is a difficult proposition for many organizations.
It can take weeks to gather, clean, prep, integrate, explore, and present the findings of diagnostic analytics. With the size of data growing every day, it’s impossible to manually explore thousands of variables or millions of combinations to isolate true root causes. Many of these complex analyses also require a high level of technical expertise, restricting many individuals from developing these crucial insights. Finally, data analysis can be executed in a number of ways and with different tools, leading to different answers to the same questions.
Several analytics and business intelligence vendors claim to offer automated insights features. However, the capabilities offered by vendors can vary widely. This post will provide an overview of automated insights, dig into what makes Tellius’ automated insights industry-leading, and provide an understanding of how automated insights can help your organization make better decisions.
Written by: Michael Marolda,
Senior Product Marketing Manager at Tellius
In This Post
What are automated insights?
Automated insights are the application of ML techniques to automatically surface insights for users. Automated analysis types available on the business intelligence and analytics market today include trend, key driver, correlation, segmentation, and more. By enabling diagnostic analytics, these generated insights help organizations understand why certain events or outcomes occur.
Automated insights help to mitigate some of these problems for organizations. First, automated insights can quickly process vast amounts of data, saving time and resources compared to manual analysis. This quick turnaround of analysis enables organizations to focus on strategic decision-making, rather than manual analysis. This fast turnaround time can also provide a strategic advantage for many organizations.
Automated insights also help organizations scale their data-driven decision-making by democratizing access to actionable insights for everyone. Automated insights, in conjunction with natural language search and AutoViz, can augment users’ workflow from business question to answer, removing the need to rely on the data team to create a new dashboard to answer a simple question. By leveraging these insights, teams have the ability to standardize the answers to the questions with ML precision.
Automated insights are not created equal
Many business intelligence companies claim to offer automated insights, but their platforms’ insight generation capabilities are severely limited. Many of the tools provide a single type of analysis with no natural language summary or a limited ability to drill into more details. This type of automated insight generation is too simple for users to effectively understand why metrics are changing within your data. It also does not expose critical details necessary for an organization to make data-driven changes.
For example, Microsoft Power BI offers limited key driver analysis, which provides a rough estimation of what’s driving changes in the data, but it lacks the ability to explore top segments or top predictive factors. The natural language data summary is limited to what Microsoft Copilot can derive from the restricted analysis. Many organizations experience performance issues when connecting to live data, delaying analysis. For more advanced analytics, Power BI users must leverage Azure AI services.
Tellius enables a wide array of automated insight types, along with a deeper analysis compared to Power BI. With key driver, trend, and cohort analysis, along with anomaly detection, automated insights provide a clear path for users to understand “why” metrics are changing. Tellius’ dual analytics engine provides performance at scale for both live data as well as in-memory.
ThoughtSpot is another tool offering limited automated insights in the form of SpotIQ. Like Power BI, there are basic top contributors and change reasons. While ThoughtSpot may include more options for analyses than Power BI, it still comes up short in democratizing these critical insights to more people in an organization, in part because it requires users to have the technical and analytics know-how to manually select the metrics and dimensions of analysis, rather than the platform picking these up automatically. Additionally, both PowerBI and ThoughtSpot analyses offer up surface-level top contributors, but to go any deeper requires more manual, advanced analysis.
Tellius automated insights, in comparison, offers the ability to dive deeper into the data to uncover the top change contributors, top reasons for the change, and the top segments in the data driving the difference. Insights in Tellius can be built with a single click via ML-assisted methodologies, augmenting analysis for everyone in the organization.
Tellius automated insights deep dive
Tellius was one of the first analytics platforms to feature a fully realized automated insights layer and has continuously been recognized as a visionary industry leader for automated insights. Tellius automated insights enables anyone, regardless of technical skill, to get to the “why” behind what is happening for faster and better decision-making. Business users benefit from simplifying complex analysis to a visual, no-code accessible point-and-click analysis with a detailed narrative explanation, while analysts gain greater agility via quicker iterations of analysis.
Tellius automated insights provide several different analyses and an unparalleled depth of analysis, while accelerating the speed to insight for all user groups. The workflow of the Tellius platform enables organizations to ask business questions with the most flexible and intuitive natural language search available today, and with a single click, users can move from visualization to insight generation, kicking off a trend, key driver, or cohort analysis.
Tellius automated insights help eliminate tedious manual exploration with the application of intelligent automation at each step of the insight generation. Tellius connects to the most popular cloud data stores, on-premise DBs, business applications, flat files, or other syndicated data sources. The platform automatically compresses, indexes, and secures data while micro-batch processing new data. Automated insights pre-process the data by handling missing/null values, data normalization, etc., then enriches the dataset with additional relevant information via manual joins or lookups. Then, it manually derives new variables by aggregating and calculating ratios from existing data.
Automated model and feature selection select the relevant features based on domain knowledge or exploratory data analysis. Automated insights filter out irrelevant or highly correlated variables. Tellius performs automated sampling, ML model selection, and hyperparameter tuning to scan the problem space for statistically significant factors. This process enables the platform to choose the appropriate ML models and weights and try a series of permutations to identify the best fit.
Automated insights then take into account the ranking and relevance of the generated output. Tellius uses automated ML-based rankings to surface the strongest and most relevant insights. This happens by analyzing the model outputs, coefficients, or importance scores to identify key features. It then ranks insights based on their significance, effect size, or business impact. Automated insights use implicit and explicit user feedback to inform insights ranking and relevance.
With a combination of natural language-generated summaries, visualizations, supporting statistics, and segments, Tellius presents the top insights to users, including top change contributors and key groupings. The natural language summary provides an easy-to-understand explanation of what is happening within the data. Multi-layer drilling provides a path to clearly identify key variables within the insight.
The output of all of these steps enables more members of your organization to understand not only what is happening in the data, but also why changes are happening in the data. Automated insights reduce the time and effort required in each step of the process, ensuring improved accuracy and consistency. This enables faster and more dynamic decision-making by opening advanced analytics to a broader set of users who are closer to frontline business issues.
Don’t just look at numbers—do something with them
Traditional business intelligence platforms provide descriptive analytics and a basic understanding of the current health of the business, but they come up short when providing recommendations for critical business decision-making. Next-generation, AI-enabled analytics platforms, on the other hand, remove many steps in the process of understanding why the data is changing and how best to move forward. Only Tellius provides a comprehensive array of automated insight options, a depth of analysis, and the ability to dive in further to understand where changes need to be made.
A top multinational pharmaceutical company leverages automated insights on Tellius to uncover millions in disputable rebate dollars. The organization was previously using a manual, time-consuming process involving joining and culling through multiple internal datasets and third-party plan/formulary data. This manual process was causing costly mistaken payments to occur. Now, the organization leverages Tellius to orchestrate and automate invoice data processing, enrichment, and monitoring. Automated insights are used to generate root cause analysis and spot disputable rebate dollars. This has led to $400k/month in disputable rebate dollars identified, an 81% efficiency gain, and 9x faster analysis.
Removing tedious manual analysis and opening data-driven decision-making to a wider audience is absolutely critical for organizations to stay ahead of the competition in a crowded business environment. With Tellius, democratizing data access and analysis is as simple as asking a business question. Tellius offers a unified, automated way to perform ad hoc analysis, diagnostic, and advanced analytics, all powered by AI.
If you’d like a demo of Tellius’ automated insights, go here.
