Joey Gaspierik, AnswerRocket Enterprise Accounts, is on the front lines working with customers every day to understand the pain points of data analysis within their organizations. Since its inception, AnswerRocket has strived to make it easy for business users to explore, analyze, and discover insights from their data.
The existing augmented analytics solution has done a considerable amount to democratize data within organizations, but the newest AnswerRocket offering, Max, furthers that mission leaps and bounds. Max is a ChatGPT-like AI assistant for data analysis that creates a truly conversational analytics experience.
Read the transcript of the interview below or watch the video on our YouTube channel:
Question: What are the current pain points around data in organizations that AnswerRocket works with?
Joey Gaspierik: First, there’s a lot of it. Everybody has a ton of data. It’s everywhere. It’s in spreadsheets, pivot tables, dashboards, usually hundreds and thousands of these different things across the bigger organizations. Also there’s not many ways for them to access this data. You have dashboards that have been delivered to the business, but the business can’t answer the questions that they really have from these dashboards, like, hey, why is this KPI up or down? Why am I losing volume? Why are our margins in trouble over the past couple of months? That’s really where they run into these walls over time because of the manual ways that they’re reviewing this analysis and Excel spreadsheets and pivot tables, and also just the limitations from a dashboard perspective where they have filters and different dashboards, and where’s that dashboard that I used to answer that question last week.
I’d say the biggest problem is around how much data, the overall volume of data that exists, and just the inability for business users to get to the answers that they need.
Question: How does Max alleviate customer pain points?
Joey Gaspierik: AnswerRocket alleviates those pain points by giving users a very approachable, a very easy way to answer business questions. Instead of having to be a data scientist or analyst or “I’ve got an MBA in some advanced analytics capability,” I can just be a business user. I can be a salesperson, marketer and have a question;
Why is my brand up?
What’s going on with my brand?
Why is my market share up?
Why are my sales up?
What should my pricing be, right?
I have these questions, and I can just ask them AnswerRocket and get answers immediately from the data. I have really the ability to be curious about anything that data allows me to be curious about. I’m not restricted to the questions that I can ask. I like to say this: It reduces the cost of curiosity to zero, as a business user.
Question: Who are the AnswerRocket power users?
Joey Gaspierik: I would call them the data literate folks in the organization, the ones who know the different metrics, the different KPIs, who understand the types of business questions and how to answer them. You’re going to find analysts, insights teams, maybe different types of sales analysts that are plugged into different parts of the business. I would say the primary power users right now are the folks who are closest to that data that have to then do that analysis manually, and who traditionally have relied on Excel spreadsheets and hours upon hours of digging through raw data to try to find answers. Those are the folks who, when they get AnswerRocket and can turn these answers around in seconds, it really just adds a ton of value to their day to day and then ultimately back to their organization because they’re able to get to these answers so quickly.
Question: How does Max change the profile of power users?
Joey Gaspierik: Max really changes everything from many different perspectives. First off, those users who traditionally have been close to the data or like I said, data literate, it really opens the door up to those less data literate folks. I don’t want to make them sound like they don’t know anything about data. These are the folks that have the questions;
Why is this happening?
What’s going on?
What’s this problem?
What are the key drivers behind that?
Historically, these are the users that have never been able to answer their own questions, have relied on other folks in the business, the analysts, the different insights teams. Now, Max presents this really approachable way to do business analysis, where I can ask questions in plain English, open ended questions, and have a conversation with an AI agent that can help me find answers to my business questions. Without ever having to tag an analyst or that insight person, which then allows those insights and analyst teams to focus on way more value added tasks that can continue to add value to the company and allows me, as a business user, to get that answer, make a decision and ultimately find growth.
Question: What are customers saying about Max?
Joey Gaspierik: What are our customers saying about Max? Well, they love Max. They love the ability to have this AI agent that they can interact with. First off, it’s such a great opportunity for them to solve this challenge of turnover or of bias in decision making as it relates, because every human that’s digging through data has to put their bias aside and say, maybe it’s not that thing that happened last month. Maybe it’s a new thing. Max being AI machine learning driven, max has no bias. Max looks at the data and he gives you insights on why things are happening and where that growth is coming from. Customers see this as a huge competitive advantage for them to make decisions, to get to answers quickly, and to really move faster than their competition in the marketplace.
Question: What is Max?
Joey Gaspierik: Max is a new feature from AnswerRocket that essentially is an AI assistant for your data analysis. Max is a chat experience where it doesn’t matter what time of day where you are in the world. You can ask Max a question about your business data and get answer and not just get any simple answer. Max has different advanced capabilities built in to where not just telling you what happened, but what’s going to happen next, why something might happen. What happens if I raise my price 6%? How is that going to impact my sales? Max is one of the smartest analysts in your business and available all the time. And, oh, by the way, he’s powered by AI machine learning. Max is able to answer any question quicker than anyone in your company can because of that compute power.
In Conclusion
There is an overwhelming volume of data in organizations and it is difficult for business users to access the answers they need. AnswerRocket addresses these challenges by offering an easy-to-use solution that allows users to ask questions and receive immediate answers from their data. Their AI assistant, Max, empowers both data-literate users and less data-savvy individuals to explore insights and make data-driven decisions. Customers have praised Max for its unbiased insights and competitive advantage, while its chat-based interface and AI capabilities provide fast and accurate responses, surpassing traditional manual analysis methods.
