Smarter choices

It’s claimed that human beings make over 35,000 decisions a day. Today, making the right decision is more difficult than ever. Thanks to easy access to information, we have more data points to take in, but as humans, we cannot process all the available information effectively. We are faced with information overload, which hampers our ability to derive great decisions. At the same time, thanks to the nature of the human brain, we tend to simplify complex information and narrow our view of reality based on what we have been exposed to. This leads to information bias, which again, makes decision making an even harder task. It comes at no surprise that according to research, it is more complex for businesses to make a decision today than it was five years ago. Increasingly, we need technologies to help us make better decisions.

In the past, industrial revolutions have advanced mankind by enhancing our physical abilities. The first revolution brought the invention of the steam engine, helping us move from place to place, the second gave us electricity, allowing us to see in the dark, and the third paved the way for advanced automation, enabling manufacturing at scale. In this fourth industrial revolution, led by artificial intelligence, we now can use technology to support our cognitive abilities. This, in turn, enhances our decision-making, a high-level process based on cognitive functions such as perception, attention, and memory.

Decision intelligence: defined

Organizations face many difficult decisions, such as whether to target a certain customer category or market through a specific channel, or allocate resources that give the best returns, and the list goes on. Currently, managers and decision-makers use business intelligence (BI) dashboards to make their decisions. However, they are faced with issues of uncertainty, incomplete information, and, more importantly, information overload. This has led to “analysis paralysis” that no doubt has plagued business decisions. To address this issue, we need a different technology to replace the biases and vulnerabilities of an outdated BI approach, to enable organizations to make responsible and informed decisions. In the business world of today, decision intelligence has quickly become one of the leading technologies that helps make better decisions and is an integral part for any organization trying to compete. Indeed, decision intelligence has solved what’s known as the last-mile problem of decision making, closing the gap between the information that we have and the choices we must make.

Global analyst firm Gartner defines decision intelligence as a practical domain framing a wide range of decision-making techniques bringing multiple traditional and advanced disciplines together to design, model, align, execute, monitor, and tune decision models and processes. These disciplines include AI, decision management, and decision support as well as techniques such as descriptive, diagnostics and predictive analytics. Google’s chief decision scientist, Cassie Kozyrkov, defines decision intelligence as “a practical approach to improve organizational decision-making. It models each decision as a set of processes, using intelligence and analytics to inform, learn from, and refine decisions.”

Decision intelligence has its roots in the scientific breakthroughs of complex systems and the ability to model intricate processes. Historically, such models were able to capture beneficial information but could never leave the sphere of academia due to them being difficult to apply to any real-world scenarios. Modern applications of data science and artificial intelligence coupled with inductive reasoning have now allowed us to systematically approach decision-making in deeply uncertain conditions.

Regardless of how technology evolves and how advanced it becomes, a human decision-maker will always be at the helm, leading and steering the ship. A qualitative side is imperative, and the human aspect is key. Therefore, human judgment is a large part of how any decision intelligence system is set up today. Decision intelligence can be thought of as a system that is made up of both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The qualitative approach comes through research done in the social and managerial sciences. On the other hand, the quantitative side is developed through research done in applied data science and artificial intelligence.

Intelmatix, leading the race toward decision intelligence

Intelmatix have harnessed the powers of decision intelligence to deliver bespoke solutions and enterprise products for organizations that provide a competitive advantage in this new era. As a deep tech company with offices set up in Riyadh, London, and Boston, Intelmatix has developed pioneering solutions for clients that achieve real impact by helping organizations reinvent their future strategies and their current operations across a multitude of sectors that range from utilities to real estate to hospitality, among others. For example, one of its latest solutions, ClearVision, is a technology developed to help city operators dispatch their inspectors in a manner that raised their efficiency by over 24%, saving the city tens of millions in operation costs.

According to Gartner, 85% of AI projects fail. This is due to many reasons such as complexity, un-scalability, and limited usability of AI tools. Intelmatix solves the challenge of AI tools complexity by offering user-friendly systems that cater toward all users, including non-technical ones. Furthermore, the current AI tool available today are not scalable by design, with no real foresight of any impending improvements needed in the future, mostly due to their short time frame of usability. Intelmatix offer scalable solutions for this exact reason. AI projects also fail due to the present limited use cases that are habitually random, solving for a very specific problem that is too often too specific. To resolve this, Intelmatix provide enterprise software that cuts across the many verticals of any organization and the many issues they face, enabling solutions to the complex problems of organizations today.

Having developed a range of tailored decision intelligence solutions, Intelmatix is now focusing on building an enterprise decision intelligence platform (EDIX), with the objective of democratizing AI accessibility and delivering decision intelligence capabilities for businesses to offer them tangible impact. With resources that pale in comparison to larger organizations, small and medium businesses increasingly require AI software that addresses a wide range of enterprise needs, while also being cost-effective and light on implementation. EDIX is an intuitive decision intelligence software that transforms decision-making to deliver a tangible business impact. It exists to answer questions like what price would maximize profit or demand, when should inventory be replenished, or how many employees should be allocated toward a certain process, and many more. Intelmatix does this by breaking the traditional silos within organizations, converting dispersed data into insights by sitting on top of existing company systems, utilizing both internal and external data.

The adoption of decision intelligence

The adoption of decision intelligence across the globe will come at unprecedented speeds due to its groundbreaking results. Gartner, which has listed decision intelligence as one of its “Top Tech Trends” of 2022, believes that a third of all large organizations will hire decision intelligence analysts as early as next year. Decision making is evolving at exponential rates and big tech companies understand the shift in pace and have jumped on the bandwagon. For example, Google hired a chief decision scientist to lead its decision intelligence needs and apply the technology across the business. IBM has also formed a decision optimization department, which oversees their decision intelligence technologies and capabilities in sectors such as transport, logistics, and energy.

This remarkable shift is happening all around us. Complex questions of whether the order of information presented influences the choices we make, who will bear the consequences of such choices, or how those decisions will be perceived, are some of the questions faced by decision makers on a daily basis. Decision intelligence will be a major toolkit for leaders in the years to come and a critical component of any business’ arsenal.