Every company or business team faces the “data crisis” at some point in their growth. At the beginning of a project, you keep your processes lean and mean, managing work in spreadsheets or on whiteboards. But as you take on more challenges, you buy a project management, marketing automation, or customer relationship tool to keep everything on track. If you are growing particularly fast, you may consider web analytics, inventory management software, billing software, or other tools suited to your function. Crucially, you keep it manageable for a while - a new tool for a new problem, but you only buy what you need.

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Then, you experience an influx of new customers, new revenue streams, or new headcount. And it all falls apart. Over several months, you witness an explosion of software and a parallel increase in complexity. You no longer wrestle with 4-5 different applications - you wrestle with ten, twenty, or potentially hundreds, each tied to a critical function of your business.

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Going into each tool to find answers becomes increasingly demanding. You might have fifty tabs open in your browser, each necessary to get you a small piece of information for understanding your business. It takes you hours to collect everything you need and you realize that your processes no longer scale. You find yourself in the dark, unable to make sense of things. How many customers do we have again? What did our revenue look like last month? Are we growing as fast as we should be? More importantly, where are we, and what should we do next?

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Something snaps, and you decide, “We can’t deal with this anymore. We need help.” You are now facing the data crisis: how do you manage all this information? 

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The Need for Data is Really a Need for Insight

As you wrestle with too many business applications, you may think, “Each of these apps produces data, so I need a way to transform my data into something useful.” Importantly, you don’t need data for data’s sake. Data alone cannot help you figure out what’s happening or what to do next. You need clarity. You need insights into your business.

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When researching how to solve this, you see the solution framed in one of three ways:

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1. Hire a data analyst or operations expert who is technical enough to understand data and business-savvy enough to translate it into actionable insights. They have titles like Revenue Operations Analyst, Marketing Analyst, or Business Analyst, and their average salary will run $80,000+ in the United States. 
2. Outsource to a business intelligence consultant who can bring all your business data into a central location and provide some self-service dashboards. You can answer some pre-defined questions yourself, but each new one may cost you thousands.
3. Buy a business intelligence tool and teach yourself how to connect to, model, query, and analyze data. These tools are significantly cheaper than the alternative, but there are a hundred options, each with a considerable learning curve.

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All these solutions have a common theme: “Let us take the dirty data work off your hands and operationalize it so you can focus on what matters: your business.” It sounds promising! Finally, a way to handle all this information in a scalable manner.

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But the result is always the same: a dashboard with the top 10 metrics for your business/project/team. While exciting at first glance - “See? It updates in real-time! It’s all in one central location!” - the novelty wears off quickly. How am I supposed to interpret this? What if I need more information? What do I do next? You have more awareness of what’s happening across your organization but don’t yet have insight. That “Aha!” moment hasn’t materialized - all this newly consolidated information does not produce any big decisions or actions. You haven’t built a new strategy or caught any significant gaps. So, despite having more clarity, you also have a sneaking suspicion that this wasn’t entirely worth the time or effort. 

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Actionable Insights Require Partnership

To make investing in data worthwhile, you must go beyond the numbers to do something meaningful. The best data analysts and consultants know this, so they hunt for actionable insights that you can use for strategic decision-making and problem-solving. They look for insights that help leaders beat their competition, create a culture of empowerment, and grow the business to achieve its full potential.

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It’s not just about giving you visibility into performance metrics; it’s about answering the big questions that move you forward  - which marketing channels to invest in and those not to waste time with, which products to launch and which to sunset, and which customers to go after and which ones won’t bite. When solving those tricky strategic problems, you don’t just need a number; you need many numbers, plus all the context of you, your business, and your industry. All this data and context must come together in the right way, at the right time, to help you make good decisions in a complex and competitive environment.

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That’s why analysts and consultants position themselves as business partners. They sit down with you and ask questions like, “What are your goals for the business?” and “How do you plan to accomplish that?” They try to understand your data and the context in which you operate: who you are, how you work, and where you want to business to go. Then, they work with you through an iterative process of gathering requirements, pulling data, and analyzing the results to help you figure out what to do next. They do this work so you, the business leader, have everything you need to build an effective strategy.

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AI Might Be Your New Partner

This is an inherently human and collaborative process. Until recently, it has only ever been the purview of data professionals and consultants. However, our technology is getting good. Scary good. Tomorrow, we may wonder if the next big blockbuster is CGI-generated or AI-generated. Whether that song we just heard was produced only by a human or if it was AI-augmented. Whether an intern or ChatGPT drafted the marketing copy in that email. Everywhere in our lives, we see humans partnering with AI to work better, automate time-consuming tasks, and enhance creativity. We should ask why our business intelligence tools don’t do the same.

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Today, the industry builds AI co-pilots that help you build more dashboards, faster. But we know this won’t solve the data crisis - you don’t need one more dashboard on top of the hundreds you already have. You need a business partner. 

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We envision a world where AI works with you and your team across every aspect of decision-making and problem-solving. AI can analyze data, perform complex tasks, and synthesize information across disparate sources. It can hook up to your business applications, anticipate your questions, and answer them before you need to ask. It can understand who you are, what you care about, and how you speak. Instead of saying, “Here are your KPIs for this quarter,” your tools can say, “Here’s how we can grow your business.” AI should work with you to discover novel insights that move you forward, not just wait for you to ask the right question.

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This AI-forward future may make the “hire/outsource/buy” decision obsolete. Or, at the very least, it will make that decision much more straightforward. If you’re the leader of a small & growing team, you may not have the time or money to invest in hiring data professionals or learning traditional business intelligence tools. But an AI analyst might do the trick, especially if it understands you, your team, and how you work.

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When facing data problems, demand more of the business intelligence industry. You don’t want the same costly, slow, or incomplete options that have defined data & analytics for the past 30 years; you want personalized and collaborative AI tools that go beyond providing insights into your business to partnering with you in solving your biggest challenges. Anything less does a disservice to the complex realities of your business.

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If you demand it, AI can provide it, and it’s up to us to build it.