Stay with me on this one… What may seem to be a hallucination at first, may be an important hidden trend in your business, identified by your AI applications.
I came across an article from Ryan Daws about AI identifying and disrupting five covert social media influence operations. It reminded me of a time when I tested and app for a FedGov program a few years back, which helped us find a “person of interest” by identifying patterns hidden deep within their social media posts and streaks.
The app finds and recommendations were so outlandish, that even then they looked like “hallucinations”. They were not, and there is a dude in USDB Leavenworth that will vouch for it; albeit not happily..
Leave it to AI to elevate the Business Intelligence (BI) game and reveal to us what is often hidden in plain sight.
Business Intelligence (BI) tools like Tableau, Infor, Looker, and PowerBI are known for the “ooh shiny” colorful dashboards and graphs that change in real time as the business day goes. We look at them and begin “reading tea leaves” when the charts are not showing what we understand as a favorable trends - most frequently a line that is “up and to the right!”.
What is driving the unpredicted changes in trends; good or bad? What is below the surface?
Most savvy business operators have years of experience that binds them to facts and views contained to their reality and experiences (the proverbial “box”). More frequently than not, their observations are limited to the “linear” world, so they link “a” to “b”; cause to effect. They live in the first order math world; our brain’s comfort zone.
Turns out that the changes we see in BI tools are frequently driven by factors related in much complex form; second and third order math world. They live in AI’s comfort zone, and that is why they are “hidden” to us. Moreover, that is why we see them as “hallucinations”; because we can’t easily wrap our brains around how the factors are related.
Just like ChatGPT can recommend bacon in a McFlurry (if the machine ever works), or dry and sweet vermouth at the same accenting a premium scotch, AI can help identify hidden patterns and challenges, and offer suggestions that would take us a long time, if ever, to consider.
How about using AI to…
Recommend types of candidates to complement your current workforce, considering skills and personal traits?
Improve financial product offerings by analyzing applicant and customer data and customer satisfaction surveys?
Insert here the hallucination you discarded…
If you are not using AI as an “independent voice” to analyze your data and business performance, you are likely missing out on key finds and opportunities to exploit; even if they don’t make sense at first.
AI is not always on a bad trip. And for the record, the bacon McFlurry was boss.
Here is Ryan’s article: