If you’ve ever been frustrated due to indecisiveness, you’ve faced decision fatigue. Cue in decision intelligence. Decision intelligence is a crucial topic that deals with choosing between alternatives. And this is beneficial to businesses today because of so many options to choose from in every part of your business.
The onus on business decision-making is to be quick, precise, and mindful of the entirety of your business intelligence. Therefore, it’s time to evolve your decision-making processes. This led to the emergence of decision intelligence to help take accurate, strong, and efficient decisions based on how knowledge-led actions can lead to outcomes.
In this blog, you’ll learn more about decision intelligence, the need for it, and its benefits.
What is Decision Intelligence?
Decision intelligence helps make accurate decisions using various techniques. It is an emerging field that uses machine intelligence to design and align decision processes and models. Decision intelligence includes decision support and management in a descriptive and predictive manner. This data processing can improve the value and reduce the time taken to decide. Decision intelligence also reduces the risk of making a wrong choice.
The Need for Decision Intelligence in Today’s Businesses
The decision-making process in businesses is mostly the same: you collect data, visualize it, find critical insights, and then use those insights to make decisions. It is a linear process where you’ll make a decision after the data is collected and understood.
But the traditional decision-making processes is typically unpredictability and complexity. Decision intelligence helps your organization evolve with decision-making using advanced technologies like ML, AI, Natural language queries, intelligent apps, and more to create comprehensive platforms.
You can use this data to see if a decision will affect the company. With it, you can also make decisions based on past information and future estimates.
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Benefits of Decision Intelligence
Here are the core benefits of decision intelligence solutions.
Helps in Making Data-Driven Decisions
According to a survey, 91% of companies feel that data-driven decision-making can improve business growth. Harvesting the benefits of data intelligence for decision-making can be tough. To make better decisions, you need to analyze data and make predictions. AI and augmented intelligence can help you find patterns, tracks anomalies in data to augment decision-making and influence outcomes.
Can Help You Make Quicker Decisions
As per the survey by McKinsey, very few organizations are happy with how they make decisions. Big decisions are often time-consuming. Multiple stakeholders are involved in any major business decision. Some members take a lot of time evaluating options, some waste time making the right choice, and others do not account for all the factors. With AI systems, it’s easy and possible to process copious amounts of data precisely.
Provides Multiple Problem-Solving Options
Decision intelligence uses AI algorithms to make decisions. These processes can highlight how decisions alter outcomes which you can use to flexibly solve multiple problems. You can also see which aspect works best in the process and choose the best choice from a multitude of options, keeping goals and growth strategies in mind.
Eliminates Mistakes and Biases From the Decision-Making Process
In any decision, there is a chance for bias to influence outcomes. Since humans are involved, personal bias and mistakes can come naturally in decision-making. Decision intelligence negates the influence of these mistakes and biases. The programmed algorithm manages all this and enhances accurate decisions.
What are the Types of Decision Models?
Here are the three types of decision models.
Human-Based Decisions
These decisions are ones where humans make all the decisions. AI systems offer data visualization and insights for humans to make decisions. These processes do not make the final choice or pick.
Machine-Made decisions
AI processes can make independent decisions in this model. AI systems make the decisions while humans are at the end of the decision-making process.
Hybrid Decisions
This is a model where AI systems and humans come together to reach an outcome. This type of model is where recommendations are made for humans. This collaboration of AI and humans offers better outputs since human cognitive intelligence is combined with the data of AI.
Best Examples of Decision Intelligence in Different Industries
Decision intelligence is used in multiple industries to drive resilient, sustainable, and cost-effective solutions for businesses.
Finance and Banking
Businesses like Morgan Stanley help clients invest more smartly with intelligent decision-making. Their platform uses decision intelligence to suggest winning investment strategies for customers. Human experts then verify these plans before suggesting them to customers. Another banking group uses decision intelligence to analyze customer behavior, predict their needs, assess pain points, and customize personalized products.
Energy Sector
Athena AI is a decision intelligence application use case firm in the energy sector. The technology helps users manage their energy resources better and ensure automatic energy and expenditure decisions. The software, through decision intelligence, forecasts solar energy and alters the capacity of the battery accordingly.
Environmental Sector
Global issues like ecological destruction, natural disasters, and environmental degradation threaten firms at all levels. Decision intelligence can predict and identify hazards keeping past and current data as the locus point. You can look at risk management solutions and mitigate disasters to an extent. Another use case is with improving decisions based on climate.
Retail
Decision intelligence also predicts better processes for goods based on customer demand, sentiments, and trends. This is the simplest use case of decision intelligence. Many companies also create software that helps retain businesses enhance their pricing decisions and optimize their policy as per customer expectations. This helps increase revenue and align supply chain processes.
Healthcare
Many companies use data analysis and decision-making to diagnose, examine, and assist doctors with patients. Enhancing medical outcomes is possible with decision intelligence. You can get a lot of insights on the next move of the treatment, determine prognosis better, and create better results.
How to Get Started with Decision Intelligence?
In a report by Gartner, it came to light that decision intelligence is a top strategic technology trend for 2022. You need to go beyond undefined data reports to get started with decision intelligence. Decision intelligence allows you to make informed decisions based on data. You can process this data with machine learning and augmented intelligence to come up with improved reports and analyses.
A. Start with a Process that is Well-Defined with Minimal Risk Involved
Decision intelligence can help you meet market needs in an automated fashion. You need to kickstart a process that is less risky and well-defined. Companies need to be integrated with top opportunities so that they don’t miss out on the scope of growth. You need to know why competitors are doing better and how you can replicate the same. Feedback can help improve the process.
B. Amplify Complex Processes involving Data Collection
When making any decision, you must keep data in mind. This decision can become easier with simple data collection. You need to involve the right data to make the right decisions. If the risks are significant, there is a chance that the outcome is also challenging.
If you simplify the process, the chances of better decision-making increase. This can take place with automation. You can revamp how data collection processes take place and create a defined, automated process around it.
C. Look out for Biased Data
If data collection is an issue like the previous point, factually correct data is another. If a company has inaccurate data, their entire decision set will be faulty. Biased data can lead to improper results, so this needs to take internal human bias into account.
D. Have a Keen Interest in AI
Data-driven decisions are always augmented with technology. Technology must interact with the product to get the desired impact. A keen interest in AI will help measure risks appropriately.
E. Take Baby Steps to Learn
It is not easy to get the best results with a single shot. You need to start with small things and learn accordingly. Many companies may be using data-driven decision intelligence without even knowing it. Though it may not be clear, it is data that is usually driving the solution. Utilizing data intelligence is possible when one learns about the process.
Final Words
Using decision intelligence powered by AI is a blessing for businesses and is crucial to improving business outcomes. It results in quicker, better, and more data-driven decisions for companies.
Companies can also drive better action by considering a wide array of information before deciding on the next step. Decision intelligence is the cement for a better future in any business. It helps augment the decision-making process.
Shivani is a talented CS manager with the skillsets to elicit, scope and manage end-to-end B2B SaaS project delivery. She has a keen interest in depicting her learnings in customer success by writing resourceful blogs and articles.
Published February 18, 2022, Updated September 16, 2024