Today’s digital economy has sped adoption of AI technology, evolved consumer preferences and demands, and created an increasingly connected society — driving a dramatic increase in the volume and complexity of business decisions that enterprises have to continuously make in order to remain relevant and competitive.
This didn’t happen overnight — yet this problem has accelerated beyond our ability to solve it with yesterday’s mindset, processes, and tools. The reality is enterprises must be able to make accurate and timely decisions in order to operate sustainably, intelligently, and efficiently.
Now imagine an AI-enabled enterprise that is able to make decisions and autonomously act on them — a self-learning, self-driving enterprise, ready to compete in the digital world. This is a model that many leading companies are already embracing. In fact, according to Gartner, “By 2026, 75% of Fortune 500 companies will apply decision intelligence, including decision networks, boosting their competitive strength.”*
To learn why decision intelligence is driving value for enterprises, let’s first dive into the decision-making challenges they face.
Solving the enterprise decision gap
Traditional decision making is a time-consuming effort that is inefficient and siloed, relying on spreadsheets and other tools to analyze data and come to a decision. People lack the time, capacity, and visibility across their roles and functions to make the best decisions at the right moment in time.
In IDC’s 2022 Global Data Valuation Survey, 65% of decisions must be made in a shorter window of time — and 50% of enterprise data is obsolete within just hours, 75% within days.**
A major challenge is breaking down the data and process silos within the enterprise. At most large companies, each team relies on a combination of ERP systems and point solutions to optimize or digitize tasks or processes such as optimizing inventory, scheduling logistics, creating manufacturing plans, and more. Meanwhile, analytics solutions gather data and perform calculations, then present the results in a dashboard, leaving it to users to analyze the output and make a decision. This often involves spreadsheets, calls, and emails to align on a decision. Finally, people then have to update each of those systems in order to execute that decision.
Not only does this approach lead to decisions being made without visibility into impacts across the enterprise, but people become the bottlenecks. If you can’t make a decision at the right moment in time, from all the intelligence coming from your systems and applications, the opportunity is wasted.
We have already moved from campaigns planned months or years in advance to campaigns planned in real time, with marketing and promotional assets connected to specific buying moments and adjusted hour by hour. And we have seen supply-chain planning cycles compressed as companies strive to keep pace with evolving consumer demand and market volatility.
The pace of business has increased dramatically, and the cumulative impact of those missed opportunities now makes the difference between success and failure, sustainability and waste. There must be a paradigm shift in decision making for companies to survive.
The future of decision making
I focused my entire career on enabling enterprise software innovation — specifically, creating and scaling technology that helps large enterprises perform better with less waste. I first wrote on decision intelligence and automation back in 2010 when I was working with a leading ERP vendor. I did not know exactly when it would become a reality but I was convinced that it would happen and I wanted to dedicate my energy to making it happen.
I started Aera Technology in 2017 with my business partner Shariq Mansoor, with a focus on enabling businesses to truly become digital and self-driving, using intelligent technology to speed and scale decision making.
At the time, applying intelligence and automation to business decision making was an avant garde concept. Today, Decision intelligence is at the heart of the digital strategy of the companies who not only want to “think and act digital” but truly want to “be” digital.
Market leaders prioritize decision intelligence and automation in their digital transformation initiatives. They are making faster, smarter decisions in real time — reducing inventory, optimizing their supplier mix, reducing product waste, and more. Today, decision intelligence is enabling the self-driving enterprise — and the market is paying attention.
Sources:
*Gartner report as- Gartner®, ‘The Future of Data and Analytics: Create Competitive Differentiation Through Better Decision Making’ June 1, 2023
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
**IDC, Automation and Metadata in Building Enterprise Intelligence, Doc # US50834123, June 2023
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