It’s claimed that human beings make over 35,000 decisions a day. Today, those decisions are becoming more complex than ever. As individuals, we’re setting more goals, needing to make more decisions, and choosing between them is getting harder, day after day. Likewise, research also shows that it is more complex for businesses to make a decision today than it was five years ago. Thus, 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 to enable manufacturing at scale. In this fourth industrial revolution, led by artificial intelligence, we now can use technology to support our cognitive abilities. In turn, enhancing our decision-making, a high-level process based on cognitive functions such as perception, attention, and memory.
Organizations face many difficult decisions such as whether to target a certain customer category, 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 To address this issue, we need a different technology to replace the biases and vulnerabilities of an outdated BI approach, to enable organizations to make responsible and informed decisions.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, 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 artificial intelligence, 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.”
However, 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 judgement 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.
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.
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 their “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, big tech companies understand the shift in pace and have jumped on the bandwagon. Google hired a chief decision scientist to lead its Decision Intelligence department and apply the technology across the business. IBM have also formed a Decision Optimization department which oversees their Decision Intelligence technologies and capabilities in sectors such as transport, logistics, and energy.
Intelmatix, a leader in Decision Intelligence, have harnessed the powers of AI to deliver bespoke solutions and enterprise products for organizations that provide a competitive advantage in this new era. We have 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, 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. Having developed a range of tailored decision intelligence solutions, Intelmatix is now focusing on building an enterprise decision intelligence platform with the objective of democratizing AI and delivering decision intelligence capabilities for businesses to offer them tangible impact.
Decision Intelligence is at the heart of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030. The leaders of today have a duty to understand the remarkable shift happening 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. Decision Intelligence will be a major toolkit for leaders in the years to come and is a critical component of the vision’s arsenal. Saudi leaders must work to achieve the vision by understanding and adopting Decision Intelligence across the board.
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