"When Business Intelligence Meets Artificial Intelligence"

Sounds easier than dumpster diving for top secret records.
Or counting trucks at a loading dock.
Or running a honeytrap on a competitor.
Ah, old school competitive intelligence.*

From Nanalyze:

Working in information technology is only great up until you decide to stop. While actively working in the business, you’re constantly exposed to the latest and greatest tools of the trade. Leave that domain, and suddenly you’re completely lost as to what’s hot and what’s not. Maybe it’s not even called information technology anymore (it isn’t), but if you worked in that capacity back when the term was relevant, you’ll know how to use structured query language (SQL). It’s how we can ask relational databases questions. (Big data is a whole different story.) For example, your human resources department might run the below query:

SELECT TOP 10 Corporate_Slave_ID,
FROM Corporate_Slave_Table
WHERE Corporate_Slave_Location = “Manila”
AND Corporate_Slave_Active = TRUE
SORT BY Daily_Call_Average ASC

This shows which people in your Manila call center are about to be replaced by the next ten people waiting in line. Seems straightforward until you throw in a few OUTER JOINS and suddenly you’re outsourcing the whole thing to John-in-Mumbai because you can’t find a decent database administrator (DBA). Or, you can save yourself that headache and turn to a company we wrote about before in our piece on Making Artificial Intelligence Easy to Use – ThoughtSpot.

About ThoughtSpot

Founded in 2012, Silicon Valley startup ThoughtSpot has taken in $554 million in funding so far with their most recent round – a $248 million Series E – placing the company squarely in the midst of 411 other unicorns grazing away on all that delicious venture capital funding. The company’s Co-founder, Ajeet Singh, knows a thing or two about growth having previously co-founded Nutanix, a cloud computing software company that had an IPO in 2016 and now sports a market cap of around $5.5 billion. In a candid interview published on Medium, he talks about the importance of entrepreneurial spirit and says what every information technology manager knows all too well – “It’s harder than you’d think to hire good engineers.”

You’d certainly need to hire some exceptionally talented software engineers to build a business intelligence tool from scratch that’s now being used by Rolls-Royce, Walmart, 7-11, Chevron, Tyson Foods, Exxon Mobil, and De Beers along with hundreds of other firms, many of which choose to remain anonymous. From a coffee shop idea to $100 million in run rate from enterprise clients in under seven years’ time, that’s what separates the “growth hacker wannabe types” from execution experts like Mr. Singh. The tool his company built democratizes business intelligence so that everyone can hack their own growth.

BI, Meet AI
Another term IT people will be familiar with is business intelligence (BI) which often manifests itself in the form of a skunkworks project being driven by a C-level “sponsor” who constantly demands an ever-changing
KPI reportTPS report for the next board meeting. According to some MBAs over at Gartner, only 35% of businesses have successfully adopted BI while the rest wait in frustration as “analysts spend countless hours and costly resources just to deliver one report or dashboard.” ThoughtSpot goes on to say:

To bridge this divide, a second wave of “self-service” desktop visualization tools entered the market in the ‘90s and early 2000s to try to meet the needs of data-hungry business users. Unfortunately, these tools created data sprawl and a governance nightmare. And despite their promise, they were still too complicated for the average business person to use without training or hours of BI support.

We’re disheartened to hear that all those BI implementations we worked on over the past two decades have largely sucked and created “data sprawl.” (H/T to ThoughtSpot for a buzzword that makes us sound relevant again.) The solution is what ThoughtSpot calls a “third wave of modern analytics solutions,” artificial intelligence to search at the speed of thought....

....MUCH MORE

*
Back in 2009, as it was becoming apparent that the AIG bailout was nothing more than a conduit to the investment banks we posted  "David Viniar, CFO of Goldman Sachs Blows Smoke at Journalists on AIG":

...My question is, "If Goldman Sachs were still a partnership, would they have entered into these transactions in the same size?"

The answer, of course, is no.

If partners equity were at risk, there is no way that they would have depended on ratings agencies to ascertain the strength of their counterparty.

Junior partners would be expected to run honey traps on AIG employees.

Lower level employees would hone their dumpster-diving skills.

Whatever it takes to gain competitive intelligence and safeguard the partnership's capital.

See also: "The optimal design of Ponzi schemes in finite economies"...