Birst Introduces Smart Analytics, Powered by Infor Coleman AI

NEW YORK, Jan. 29, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Birst, an Infor company and a leader in Cloud Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics for the Enterprise, today introduced its Smart Analytics family of solutions, powered by Infor Coleman AI.

Birst Smart Analytics is a new set of AI-enabled capabilities that elevate organizations above traditional reports and dashboards, using machine learning algorithms to power intelligent insights not previously available to business users. Built with patented technologies, Birst Smart Analytics delivers automated and personalized insights and recommendations that transform the Business Intelligence (BI) experience from descriptive (what is happening) to diagnostic (why is it happening) and predictive (what will happen).

Smart Insights, the first in this series of capabilities, empowers business users to tap into the power of data science and instantly understand the variables driving their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Requiring no specialized expertise, Smart Insights helps business users find meaningful relationships between a given KPI and countless business variables, and then automatically generate visualizations and dashboards that explain the KPI's behavior.

The dashboards generated by Smart Insights follow Birst's Value-Based Design (VBD) methodology, which encompasses best practices for driving meaningful business outcomes with analytics. This means that the insights produced are more impactful because they prioritize the attributes that have the greatest impact on particular KPIs.

Additional capabilities that Birst plans to introduce, in the Smart Analytics family, include Anomaly Detection, Natural Language Generation/Querying (NLG/NLQ), and Intelligent Alerting, among others.

"AI is completely changing the way that people work and interact with data," said Brad Peters, SVP and General Manager of Birst. "Starting with Smart Insights, our Smart Analytics solutions will help expand the reach of BI more broadly than ever before.  Business users will take advantage of capabilities that until now had been available only to highly skilled data scientists. They'll gain insights from data in a faster and more scalable way – often discovering relationships among data that they may not even have considered."  

Better Decisions with Smart Insights

Using the Birst platform's robust semantic layer (a common set of business definitions across analytic instances), Smart Insights can provide more personalized, trusted and actionable intelligence than competing solutions.

"The automated reports provided by competing solutions are quite generic and are prone to presenting random insights without much context or meaning," Peters said. "Birst Smart Insights, on the other hand, helps business users provide context to the data by selecting areas of interest that result in much more valuable and relevant insights. The real value of AI in analytics is not in automating, but in augmenting the decision-making process, and that is what we're doing with Smart Insights."

Specialty's Café & Bakery, which operates more than 50 restaurants in California, Washington and Illinois, is looking to use Birst's Smart Insights capability to drive decisions related to product development and selection, inventories, staffing and more, to attract and keep customers.

"With Birst Smart Insights, our business users are automatically presented with deeper, root-cause analysis without having to depend on an analyst or a data scientist," said Matt Riley, Lead Data Warehouse Engineer at Specialty's Café & Bakery. "We can uncover reasons why labor costs are high this week, for example. Or, we can make smarter menu recommendations to our ecommerce customers. Birst automatically finds relationships hidden in our data and presents them to our decision makers in easy-to-understand dashboards. And because Machine Learning is built into the Birst platform, we don't have to hire data scientists or bring in other tools such as R or Python to discover insights."

Further, with the Networked BI capabilities of the Birst platform, business users can bring in their own local data, link it to analytic instances across the corporate network, and apply Smart Insights to this extended data set to get a more complete picture of what's driving business performance.

Ultimately, Birst Smart Insights significantly reduces the barrier to finding new insights, enabling more business users to make better decisions without having to rely on experts. With AI, Smart Insights gives business users the power to harness the intelligence of their organizations and their data.

Summary: Key Features of Birst Smart Insights

• Discovers meaningful relationships between business attributes and measures, and KPIs, at a scale and speed greater than previously possible
• Automatically creates new dashboards and reports, following Value-Based Design principles
• Delivers personalized results, based on dashboard context, including applied and implied filters (security) from the governance layer
• Finds insights across the entire Birst semantic layer (i.e., analyzes all related data, including networked data or end-user-blended data)

Infor Coleman AI
Infor Coleman is a powerful artificial intelligence platform designed specifically for business users – built upon a foundation of industry-specific data. At any given moment, it can help with executing tasks, recommending next-best sales offers, and even predicting maintenance issues and adjusting production schedules accordingly. The platform is named after the inspiring physicist and mathematician Katherine Coleman Johnson, whose trail-blazing work helped U.S. astronauts land on the moon, Coleman represents a giant leap for artificial intelligence at scale.

Additional Resources

• Register for the Birst Smart Analytics online product launch event, which will air, live, at 10 a.m., Pacific Time, on Thursday, Jan. 31.
• Hear from executives and experts about Birst's vision for AI-powered BI
• See a live demonstration of Smart Analytics, powered by Coleman AI
• Learn how a leading retailer is taking customer experience to the next level with Birst Smart Analytics
• Learn about Birst co-founder Brad Peters' and Birst's unique vision for using machine learning automation to bring the power of analytics and BI to business users.
• Read the Birst blog, "How AI is Lowering the Barrier to Entry for BI and Analytics."

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@BirstBI introduces Smart Analytics, powered by @Infor #Coleman #AI; Smart Insights is first in series of AI-enabled capabilities that will transform #BI #analytics #getsmartanalytics http://bit.ly/2T7uVee

About Birst, an Infor Company
Birst is an advanced networked business analytics platform. Organizations can achieve a new level of trusted insight and decision making by connecting their data and people via a network of analytics services. Birst scales from individuals to the enterprise in a manner that is smart, connected, and scalable. Learn more at www.birst.com.

About Infor
Infor is a global leader in business cloud software specialized by industry. With 17,300 employees and over 68,000 customers in more than 170 countries, Infor software is designed for progress. To learn more, please visit www.infor.com.

Infor customers include:

• 19 of the top 20 aerospace companies
• 9 of the top 10 high tech companies
• 18 of the 25 largest U.S. healthcare delivery networks
• 18 of the 20 largest U.S. cities
• 19 of the top 20 automotive suppliers
• 17 of the top 20 industrial distributors
• 15 of the top 20 global retailers
• 4 of the top 5 brewers
• 17 of the top 20 global banks
• 9 of the 10 largest global hotel brands
• 8 of the top 10 global luxury brands

This announcement reflects the direction Infor may take with regard to the specific product(s) described herein, all of which is subject to change by Infor in its sole discretion, with or without notice to you.  This announcement is not a commitment to you in any way and you should not rely on this document or any of its content in making any decision.  Infor is not committing to develop or deliver any specified enhancement, upgrade, product or functionality, even if such is described in this announcement and even if such description is accompanied by words such as "anticipate," "believe," "expect," "intend," "may," "plan," "project," "predict," "should," "will," and/or similar expressions.  Many factors can affect Infor's product development plans and the nature, content and timing of future product releases, all of which remain in the sole discretion of Infor.  This announcement, in whole or in part, may not be incorporated into any contractual agreement with Infor or its subsidiaries or affiliates.  Infor expressly disclaims any liability with respect to this announcement.

Media contact:
Steve Bauer
Infor
(628) 444-5101 (office)
(650) 670-7135 (mobile)
[email protected]

SOURCE Infor

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