White Paper

AI-Powered Data Stories: a new approach to data

The innovative approach based on Natural Language Generation that allows the automatic generation of data stories.

The rise of data storytelling

The stories told from data can solidify understanding of statistics in a way that bullet points and numbers cannot. The data becomes more valuable as they engage the audience and economize the conveying of complex ideas. This makes the data more memorable, useful and exciting, contributing to foster a more data literate workplace.

The goal of data storytelling solutions is not only to describe and communicate insights from the data, but to turn insights into action; insights which in turn must drive business-decision processes of data-driven companies. A data story must suggest to final users what is happening, why is happening and how to act to manage it, minimizing timing and human effort.

The match between data story and artificial intelligence

AI-Powered Data Story is the merging between Data Story and Artificial Intelligence. The three main keywords at the core of this approach are NLP, NLU and NLG (respectively Natural Language Processing, Understanding and Generation): each one plays different roles at different points. The relation among them can be described by the following equation: NLP = NLU + NLG.

NLU is the set of AI techniques and applications aimed to understand human language, and convert it into data. NLG, instead, represents the set of techniques that use structured data to generate meaningful narratives. NLP is the sum of NLU and NLG. Businesses will invest more in NLP techniques to build systems that would be unsupervised, effortless, and be able to interact successfully in a human-like manner.

The business value

AI-Powered Data Stories are a game changer for Business Intelligence and impact operational business decisions in near real time, automatically generating actionable business insights using the more effective interaction with human: the conversation. The business value they generate can be categorised into three domains.

Data Democratization

Employing a conversational approach, data and analytics become accessible for everyone. The application of NLU allows interaction with computers without having to type a single word - this is referred to as “query less search”. The application of NLG allows then to receive information coming from data in a conversational way as text, creating a stronger engagement of the final business user.

Data Engagement

By adding narrative to visualization, insights and actions are directly and automatically suggested to business users, who are consequentely more engaged with the data, thus increasing their data-driven decision processes.

Speeding up the time-to-market

Thanks to AI-Powered Data Story, the IT-bottleneck disappears. Business users can easily access to data and interact through conversation, minimizing the time needed to transform data into insights and decisions.

Reply’s support

We strongly believe in this new approach, therefore we are ready to address and analyze the new technologies that will appear on the market, designing use cases for POCs and then creating projects for real business use cases, with the main aim of presenting cutting-edge and reliable solutions.

We can support you in different ways: 

  • Through workshops in which we explore the main experiences and use cases we've worked on; 

  • By analyzing your business context to define at which level it is preferable to take the new AI-Powered Data Automation approach; 

  • By helping you choose the best AI-powered Data Story solution for your needs through surveys and assessment sessions.

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