BY JOE DYSART

While artificial intelligence (AI) has made quite a splash in almost every aspect of running a business and the equipment needed to do so, its helpfulness when it comes to running reports should not be overlooked. AI-generated reports have the potential of really helping your business uncover insights and trends that could be game-changers when it comes to targeting, monitoring and analyzing your customers — and freeing up time for you to focus on other key projects.

“Any time a business can automate administrative and mundane tasks, it’s useful to the enterprise, reduces human error, and boosts productivity,” said Brian Everett, Senior Partner, MindShare Strategies, a marketing firm.

These AI-generated reports can drill-down into your business database and auto-produce easy-to-understand, written reports — unearthing insights about trends and car wash performance that might otherwise go unnoticed. In a nutshell, any data report your car wash currently produces — or may be looking to produce in coming years — can be enhanced with AI-generated writing.

OPTIONS, OPTIONS, OPTIONS

For a number of years, the AI toolmakers behind these automatically written reports have been adding their tech with custom installations at businesses, one business at a time.

But more recently, many of these same toolmakers have started offering this tech — also referred to as natural language processing (NLG) — as off-the-shelf solutions designed to work with commonly used business programs.

So if you’re currently using a popular program like Microsoft Excel, for example, you’ll find a number of AI companies have already had pre-configured AI-generated writing solutions that plug-into Microsoft Excel.

Plus, the same holds true for other commonly used business intelligence programs, such as Microsoft Power BI, Microstrategy, Qlik, Spotfire SAP or Tableau.

Essentially: If you use any one or more of those business intelligence programs, you can buy a pre-configured solution, which will auto-write reports based on your business data — almost instantly.

The result: Once you integrate AI-generated writing software to any one of those programs, the rich, colorful visualizations of data you already get from the software you’re already using will be accompanied by easy-to-understand text descriptions of what you’re seeing on screen.

“NLG-driven, multi-dimensional narratives are the breakthrough that (data-generated) visuals were years ago,” said Sharon Daniels, CEO, Arria, an AI-generated writing toolmaker.

“The Big Data problem was partially addressed with the evolution of business intelligence dashboards,” she said. “But while visuals paint a picture, they’re not the complete picture.

“With the addition of NLG, business intelligence dashboards are transformed,” Daniels said. “The ability to access key information in near real-time, communicated as if written by the company’s top analyst, without bias — at an NLG writing-speed — is truly astonishing … It’s what users are demanding: complete information, faster conclusions and better decision-making.”

TELLING YOUR DATA-STORY

AI-reports aren’t just about data; they are about storytelling, as well — data storytelling.

“Instead of forcing people to learn how to analyze spreadsheets or explore dashboards, ‘data storytelling’ uses simple, easy-to-understand language and one-click collaboration features to ensure that everyone in your company actually understands data, all the time,” said Anna Schena, Senior Product Manager at Narrative Science, another AI-generated writing toolmaker.

“With data storytelling, your team can read a personalized story that tells them what they need to know about their business — tailored specifically to their needs, automatically.

“Data storytelling technology is intelligent,” Schena said. “It naturally articulates the most important and interesting information to each employee, every day. And it allows them to share that information with each other.”

With easy-to-understand text added on, data from business intelligence systems becomes more accessible to more people — given that not everyone is comfortable making business decisions based on a chart, graph or similar graphic illustration alone, Schena said.

Pooja Parthasarathy, Senior Product Manager, Narrative Science, said business reports auto-created with AI-generated writing make insight and decision-making at a company much easier because “everyone knows the same story.

“There’s no interpretation and there’s no element of guesswork or (alternative) perspective that goes into to it. Everyone is looking at, and understanding, the same story. Together.”

FINDING THE NEEDLE

Moreover, by customizing the kind of text reports these AI programs can generate for you, car washes will able to zero-in on just the kind of information and just the kinds of insights they’re looking for — instead of wading through torrents of irrelevant data.

Plus, having an automated report writer in-house also offers car washes the opportunity to generate more reports, more often, said Schena.

For example: Why be satisfied with a performance report on your car washes’ sales each month, when you can auto-produce a performance report each week — or even each day?

Some seasoned users of AI-generated business reports even program these systems to offer an updated report every time a staffer opens up their business intelligence software on their computer.

One caveat: Car washes looking to bring AI-generated writing tools in-house should know upfront that their ability to fully optimize their use of AI-report generating tools will need some ramp-up time.

“People must invest a significant amount of time and resources to set up and perfect NLG software on the front end,” said Mindshare’s Everett. Plus, after reports and articles are generated, people still need to review and tweak the text to ensure it makes sense and is error-free. he said.

GOING SHOPPING

One of the best ways to shop for AI-generated writing software is to check-out market leaders in the space and then scout around for other solutions that might go for less, have fewer bells-and-whistles — but may be just fine for the reports you want.

Currently, the top three players in AI-generated writing are Automated Insights, Narrative Science and Arria, according to a market research report released by market research firm Forrester.

These three AI-generated writing toolmakers offer solutions that demonstrate the greatest ability to auto-generate richly worded text from data, according to Forrester.

The top three also offer the most customization, in terms of the kinds of reports that can be generated, as well as the number of writing styles that can be used to generate the reports.

The second tier — strong performers — are two business intelligence software makers that have added AI-generated writing to their existing software suites: SAP and Salesforce, according to Forrester.

And on the third tier are ‘contenders’ AX Semantics, Yseop, IBM and Marlabs.

(A free copy of the Forrester report — normally $1,295 — is available at a link on Yseop’s Web site: https://www.resources.yseop.com/NLG-Market-Guide.)

Gartner Group, another market research firm, came up with a similar list of key players in a report, www.gartner.com/en/documents/3942031, released in June 2019: Arria, Automated Insights, AX Semantics and Yseop.

Even if you’re not in the market for AI-generated writing right now at your car wash, you’re going to want to track this tech closely in coming years. It’s poised to dramatically alter the way car washes glean insights from the data being collected.