In the rapidly evolving landscape of enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) tools, AnswerRocket aims to complement, rather than displace, existing technologies. AnswerRocket streamlines the way businesses interact with data and gain valuable insights. In a recent interview, Co-founders Mike Finley and Pete Reilly shed light on the platform’s unique positioning alongside traditional dashboards and reports.
How does AnswerRocket fit in alongside other enterprise BI tools?
Mike: Are we trying to displace the dashboards and the reports and all the things that businesses do today, right? It’s not about displacing those technologies. It’s about removing the friction. Right. So we’ve seen so many examples of companies that have 600 different reports. They have so many reports, they don’t even know which one to use. Right? With something like AnswerRocket in place, you can just ask your question, and it will find the right source, whether that’s stored in an existing dashboard, in an existing business intelligence tool. Wherever that information is stored in documents, we’re going to be able to go retrieve it, pull it into the language model, and let the language model answer the question based on those facts. Right? So it’s not about eliminating the value that’s been created by the calculations and the historical trends and things that have been observed, because all those business practices are very valuable and they’re key to how enterprises run. It is about removing the friction of leveraging those things, right? So it’s all about being able to take advantage of them in an easier way, to be able to get to that information faster, to be able to compete better in a way that’s more satisfying to the human users. Because they’re no longer in the tedium of working through the processes of finding data and joining it up and putting it into a spreadsheet.
Pete: Dashboards aren’t going away anytime soon. Look, most companies, the major key performance indicators that people’s bonuses are based on are on these dashboards, right? And it’s a unified way for a company to look at their overall performance, see how we’re tracking, are we hitting our goals or not? That’s here to say, okay, so changing that out would be herculean effort. But what you end up seeing is that a lot of times these dashboards, they’re really good for just reporting the news, like, what happened. They’re really not great at helping you understand why that thing happened, or what would happen if I did something differently, or what’s going to happen next, or what I should do. It’s terrible at all those things. And that’s where really, I think we come in, is automating those questions and getting users to these business decisions sooner, because what they do today, they go to that dashboard and somebody downloads a bunch of data so they can do all this analysis.
And I think I agree with Mike. To me, what ends up happening is those dashboards are in place. They become a data source for something like AnswerRocket. It’s just another place to get governed information that’s been cleansed and approved and so on that people can then use to automate their analysis and make good businesses use it.
Conclusion: Dashboards remain integral to most organizations, serving as unified hubs for tracking key performance indicators and overall performance. However, they often fall short in providing deeper insights, such as understanding the reasons behind certain outcomes or predicting future scenarios. This is where AnswerRocket excels, automating complex questions and empowering users to make data-driven business decisions faster and more efficiently. By integrating with existing dashboards as a reliable data source, AnswerRocket facilitates automated analysis, enabling users to gain meaningful and actionable insights to drive business success.
