A recap of AnswerRocket’s Emerging Technology Session from the 2023 CMA|SIMA Show
AnswerRocket was excited to be a platinum sponsor of the 2023 Category Management and Shopper Insights Conference at Caesars Palace. It’s an event we look forward to each year and this was our fifth year participating. We were pleased to meet and network with many of the 900+ attendees and host our own Emerging Technology Session.
We partnered with Abdul Raheem, Director Global Analytics Lab of Mondelēz International, to speak to a packed audience of about 200 attendees.
The topic? How ChatGPT and AI will help consumer packaged goods companies get faster category insights.
The Challenge
Mondelēz was experiencing the same pain points that most large companies have when it comes to their data. That frustration is that while dashboards and reporting are great, they can cause you to fall into a vicious cycle of waiting hours, if not days, to answer a question. If you have a follow up question or want to dig deeper into the data points, that will take even longer.
As one might assume, mountains of cumbersome data and time delays are less-than-conducive to success in the competitive snacking industry.
Why Augmented Analytics?
Augmented Analytics uses AI and machine learning to drastically cut-down on the amount of manual analysis that business users and analysts have to do, to reach their end goal of actionable insights.
What They Used Augmented Analytics For
For Mondelēz, the switch from traditional to augmented analytics allowed them to “increase their computation efficiencies.” They no longer had to depend on a data scientist to create a model for a specific scenario, they could now enable business users to do that on the fly using AI and machine learning to interact with their own data sets. This means faster insights and outcomes for all involved.
Mondelēz leveraged AnswerRocket’s augmented analytics platform to solve a variety of business problems:
- Predicting the impact of COVID stimulus on cookie demand
- Forecasting Easter Egg sales in Brazil to avoid overstocks and buy-backs at the end of the season
- Numerous other Nielsen data use cases globally and locally
Increased access to these insights and forecasts gave Mondelēz the competitive advantage that they value as a pillar in their business.
However, despite the power of augmented analytics to help overcome their data hurdles, driving broad adoption across the organization was still a challenge.
The Next Leap in Analyzing Data with AI
Abdul is excited about the future of data analysis which includes pairing ChatGPT technology with an augmented analytics platform.
Joining the two technologies enabled AnswerRocket to create an AI assistant for data analysis that’s available anytime, anywhere, to chat about your data and provide insights. We’re calling it Max.
The implications of offering an on-demand analyst are huge.
Max In Use
For companies who are building Max into their future data analysis plans, what does that look like?
And just like a coworker who you might have a conversation with, Max can be trained to understand your preferences and objectives through reinforcement learning.
Because of how easy it is for anyone, in any role, with any skillset to use, Max removes traditional “adoption obstacles”. The team at AnswerRocket anticipates a much higher adoption rate across organizations than what we typically see with business intelligence tools. Where most BI tools can expect to see about a 20 to 30% adoption rate, we hope to see closer to 60 to 75% adoption rate by organizations utilizing the Max platform.
Max gives us the tremendous ability to put AI + Machine Learning + Answers in the hands of entire teams.
So why not just use ChatGPT on its own?
ChatGPT is a large language model that’s been trained on the internet but it doesn’t understand your business, your playbook, or your customers. You can ask ChatGPT general questions about your industry, but it won’t be able to provide insights into your brand’s specific data.
How Will ChatGPT + AI Accelerate Category Insights?
Category Managers and Buyers want data-driven insights, but they typically don’t want to spend most of their time in the weeds analyzing data and learning new BI tools. A conversational analytics experience powered by ChatGPT removes that burden by giving end users an approachable, familiar chat interface to interact with.
An AI-powered data analyst empowers category managers to tell a better story, faster, to their buyers. It gets users out of data wrangling and into decision making and market strategy.
Democratizing Data. Equipping Teams to Make Better Decisions.
ChatGPT has done more to bring AI to the masses in the last 4 months than we’ve seen in the last decade. By offering access at no cost to everyday users, ChatGPT is encouraging widespread adoption and use by any-and-everyone for any-and-everything. This effectively removes the “shroud of mystery” around AI as being this big, intimidating, expensive thing for use only by the most intelligent minds for the most complex tasks.
ChatGPT is making AI usable for everyone.
Because of this, more and more teams are leaning into AI and trying to understand how it applies to them, and how it can be used in their jobs to make their lives easier, regardless of industry or specialty.
In the augmented analytics space, the need for “doing more with less” – less budget, less time, less people, is more prevalent than ever. Analysts are swimming in a sea of data with more questions to answer and insights to provide.
Combining the capabilities of ChatGPT with an augmented analytics platform means more insights for more teams, faster than ever before. It is the democratization of data in its truest form.
Taking the Next Leap
From traditional analytics, to augmented analytics, to an AI assistant for analyzing your data, organizations are only getting more agile and competitive with each step in the evolution. Abdul shares the AnswerRocket team’s excitement for the future of chat-based analytics. Though the technology is in its early stages, the implications of offering an on-demand analyst are huge.
Attendees of our session got a sneak peek at AnswerRocket’s ChatGPT-based analytics solution. We encourage you to reach out to us if you’d like to see what we’re working on.
We loved the opportunity to visit with everyone at the conference and chat with our friend Abdul about the changing world of augmented analytics. We look forward to seeing you again next year at CMA|SIMA!
