It seems like you can’t read a technology news article or talk to a technology vendor or a consultant without AI finding its way into the topic or the conversation. This is especially true for all topics around business intelligence (BI). Indeed, almost a third of enterprise data and analytics decision-makers reported in 2020 that they planned to use or had already leveraged AI to improve their data and analytics platforms (29%) and gain better customer insights (27%), and these numbers grew in 2021. So will AI radically change the way enterprises gain insights and make decisions based on BI platforms and applications infused with AI capabilities? (Forrester calls these platforms augmented BI.)

The answer to that question is both yes and no. Yes, augmented BI has potential to break through some of the barriers (adoption, usability, etc.) that applications based on legacy BI platforms aren’t able to overcome. But that potential success won’t come without a cost — the cost of the hard work still needed to set up, tune, optimize, and, most importantly, personalize enterprise BI applications.

Join me at the upcoming Forrester virtual Data Strategy & Insights event (#ForrDataInsights) on November 18 and 19 for networking and 1:1 sessions with myself and my colleagues. I also encourage you to attend my session, The Future Of BI: Augmented And Personalized, on Friday, November 19 at 2:15 p.m. ET, where I plan to review the benefits and challenges (and how to overcome them) of augmented BI.

Hope to see you there!