Quantexa

What is Decision Intelligence?

Put decision intelligence at the heart of your organization. This guide explains what decision intelligence is, why it's important, and which organizations can use it.

Imam Hoque
Imam HoqueChief Evangelist, Quantexa
Jan 2nd, 2024
15 min read

Context is everything – especially in times of uncertainty and volatility. Organizations are making millions of decisions every day, but when they base those decisions on experience alone, the results can become disconnected from reality.

Data ensures decisions are based on facts, especially when automation is added to data – saving time and effort, and enabling a true digital experience for customers.

To make sound, data-driven decisions, you need the right data in the right context. Without it, there’s a domino effect that results from poor decision-making.

Decision intelligence enables private and public-sector organizations to go from “guess-work” recommendations and decisions to informed and confident ones derived from trusted data.

What is decision intelligence?

Decision intelligence supports nuanced decision-making at every level – strategic, operational, and tactical – to provide confidence in tools such as artificial intelligence that help automate businesses and enable faster, more accurate decisions.

Decision intelligence improves decision-making by understanding how decisions are made, and how outcomes are evaluated, managed, and improved through deeper insights.

Context plus confidence: It’s this combination that gives you data with meaning, supports your decisions, and builds lower-cost business resiliency.

Decision intelligence is the latest step in the evolution of business intelligence. Instead of combining all available data, context-free, and presenting it to a decision-maker, decision intelligence uses artificial intelligence (AI) to provide a single analytical view – to either fully automate decisions or to help data professionals make faster, more accurate decisions through augmentation.

Why is decision intelligence important for organizations?

Running an efficient and resilient business is harder than ever before. And decision-making is becoming more demanding, with little margin for error.

Here's some of the reasons it's harder to run an efficient and resilient business than ever before:


As Gartner notes, decision-making competency can be a significant source of competitive advantage. Gartner predicts that by 2024, one-third of large organizations will use decision intelligence for structured decision-making to improve competitive advantage and optimize efficiency. Decision intelligence was also named one of Gartner’s top strategic technology trends for 2022.

Using artificial intelligence, decision intelligence unlocks the power of entity resolution and graph analytics to turn data into accurate decisions at scale. This means that data becomes more than the sum of its parts – not piecemeal, siloed, and afflicted with poor quality. Entity resolution connects all data from previously siloed and scattered points, and creates a single, trusted, connected, and reusable resource.

How does decision intelligence use artificial intelligence?

In today's fast-paced business world, decision-makers are often under intense pressure to make fact-based, consistent decisions in a hurry. This is why enterprises turn to technologies such as AI and machine learning (ML) to augment their decision-making capabilities.

The problem is that organizations often deploy these technologies without fully understanding the importance of placing the data they collect in context to gain the bigger picture of what data is being collected and how it is being applied to the decision-making process. Without context, AI predictions lack dependability, opening the door to a wide range of long-term automation challenges and other setbacks that can sink profits.

Entity resolution is what gives data context by connecting billions of data points spread across multiple systems into a single, accurate view that reflects the real-world connections between people, places, and organizations to create a single source of truth.

When it comes to employing AI and ML as part of the decision-making process, the quality of the data you use is everything. This is why data scientists are so tightly focused on using reliable, transparent data to make the best algorithms possible.

What are the critical components of a decision intelligence platform?

Decision intelligence platforms employ a new generation of software designed to automate or augment processes – empowering operational teams to make faster and more accurate strategic, tactical, and operational decisions.

By utilizing the power of artificial intelligence, these platforms connect billions of data points across internal and external data sources to provide a trusted and reusable data hub enriched with vital intelligence about the graph of relationships between real-world entities such as: people, organizations, events, and places.

Quantexa brings these capabilities together in its single Decision Intelligence platform to give organizations the ability to protect their most valuable assets, optimize their resources, and identify opportunities for growth by providing the tools. Quantexa's platform takes these three steps:

Unify data: Integrate any source at scale to build a trusted data foundation
  • With multi-source data ingestion, you can rapidly onboard any source – internal, external, structured, or unstructured.

  • Using Entity Resolution, you can bring siloed, disparate, and messy data together at scale for accurate single views.

  • Continuously improve data quality as part of the unification process.

Create context: Reveal relationships and insights, create stronger analytics
  • Reveal the relationships and context of how people, organizations, places, and other entities interact with each other.

  • Generate insights that build stronger, more meaningful analytical models.

  • Use open and easy-to-use tools and frameworks to make use of the full power of innovative graph, AI, and machine-learning methods.

Decide and act: Augment and automate decision-making for actionable insights
  • Automate manual, high-volume operational decisions and maximize your investments in AI for efficiency and cost savings.

  • Transparent models mean each decision is explainable, with full visibility for security and regulatory requirements as well as model validation and optimization purposes.

  • Empower teams to proactively explore insights and act — making faster, more confident, and more accurate decisions.

The ideal decision intelligence platform should also integrate easily with your existing IT landscape and support flexible deployment options: native or containerized, for private and public cloud, to future-proof your business and its growing data needs.

This platform should also provide quick time-to-value through a modular approach, allowing you to expand your platform's capabilities as your business grows.

What are the benefits of decision intelligence?

Onboarding the right decision intelligence platform empowers enterprises to use their massive databases more efficiently to:

These benefits are being capitalized on by key industries across the business sector.

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What industries can use decision intelligence technology?

Decision intelligence is being utilized by more and more businesses, but we've seen the first adopters within these key sectors.

Banking

The impact of new digital applications, processes, and business models is transforming the financial world. There’s fresh competition from fintech startups that threaten to siphon off customers and cut into revenues through more artificial intelligence automation and a lower cost base.

Consumers embrace of all things digital and mobile demands new products and new levels of service, with an expectation of real-time everything. These demands make it critical that financial organizations identify and manage emerging risks and opportunities while preserving the ability to quickly respond.

The right decision intelligence platform can provide unrivaled context through single views of customers and counterparties with rich graphs of their relationships, enabling banking and financial institutions to increase data availability, while maintaining privacy and security. Banks can also tap into the latest advancements in AI to empower digital transformation and enable confident, data-driven decisions and create a digitally resilient, cost-effective organization.

Insurance

The insurance industry’s increasing effort to meet changing customer expectations is driving rapid digital transformation. “Going digital” puts a greater focus on using complex customer data in near real-time to manage risk and offer competitive services to potential customers.

With the continued focus on loss ratios, operational expenses, and providing better customer service, the pressure is on insurance organizations to unlock value from their data to manage risk and offer competitive products and services.

The right decision intelligence platform can help insurers connect and operationalize internal and external data that delivers a holistic view. The result: a faster, richer understanding of every applicant, customer, claimant, third-party, and supplier across the value chain.

When insurers have confidence through the right data and context, they can better protect against fraud risk and focus on growing their business – using a deeper customer understanding to limit customer churn, optimize pricing based on customer behavior, and discover cross-sell or upsell opportunities.

Government and public sector

Agencies in the public sector need to ensure the integrity of payment programs and supply chains, carry out complex operations, counter fraud, enable security, and safely share intelligence. The right decision intelligence platform allows government and public sector agencies to be interoperable, securely integrating into existing systems to boost efforts to stop fraud, ensure compliance, investigate crime, and improve the safe movement of people and goods.

Stopping fraud is vital to the government sector’s bottom line. In the United Kingdom, the government plans to spend £25 million to crack down on fraudsters who steal taxpayer money. Through the secure utilization of data, the right decision intelligence platform aids agencies to foster transparency, improve trust, and enable quick decision-making to create safer communities across the globe.

Telecommunications

Telecommunications organizations are up against an increasingly competitive market as their traditional revenue streams, such as connectivity, infrastructure and voice-centric services are commoditized.

Companies are focused on developing differentiated products and go-to-market strategies that enable new revenues, compelling offerings, and excellent customer experiences.

The right decision intelligence platform can help telecommunications organizations become more data-driven and customer-centric by bringing disparate and ambiguous data together at scale using extremely accurate, dynamic entity resolution capability.

This helps telecommunications organizations get full use of their internal and external data to get a full, customer-360 view so they can grow revenue, reduce churn, increase wallet share, and achieve operational efficiency.

What is the impact of decision intelligence?

Decision intelligence and the ability to utilize entity resolution to create a complete, meaningful view of data across an enterprise provides the contextual data foundation businesses need to enhance decision-making across the customer lifestyle, uncover hidden risks, and discover unexpected opportunities.

It’s clear that decision intelligence is a critical must-have. The key reason, says Joseph Sieczkowski, CIO and Chief Architect of BNY Mellon, is that data and contextual decision-making are core to the bank’s digital transformation.

“Our hard-won vantage point is allowing us to use data science to highlight future opportunities, which in turn, we can present back to our customers to help them increase revenue, reduce costs, and reduce risks,” says Sieczkowski.

That point is echoed by Bina Mehta, Chair at KPMG, who explains that data is at the core of enterprise decision-making.

“It’s about making better decisions and about managing our risk,” Mehta says. “But it’s not just about our financial performance – it’s about the other commitments we make. In our world, that might be quality, customer service, and ESG commitments. Those measures are harder to pinpoint. That’s why data is really valuable in the broader sense.”

By investing in decision intelligence today, organizations can build trust in their data and establish a culture of confidence in automated or augmented decision-making to protect, optimize, and grow their business.

How has decision intelligence changed traditional ways of decision-making?

Before the advent of decision intelligence to bring data together, data was often scattered across systems, siloed, incomplete, or of such poor quality that it was difficult to make connections. This often led to poor or wrong decisions that hurt the customer experience and lost revenue.

Today, decision intelligence provides the means to harness this fragmented data to provide a holistic, trusted view of B2C and B2B customers, allowing decision-makers and analysts to uncover hidden patterns that were previously unseeable to dramatically increase the value of insights.

With Quantexa's Decision Intelligence platform, decision-makers are now empowered to:

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Get a holistic, trusted view of customers

Connect disparate data from internal systems and external sources to form a 360-degree view of your customers.

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See a broader picture of relationships

Interlink distinct entities to see the big picture. Gain deep understanding of relationships such as social connections, households, corporate structures, and supply chains.

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Uncover hidden opportunities

Use advanced analytics to trigger real-time insights that enhance customer experience and drive growth.

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Tap into trusted data insights

Provide a rich visualization layer along with open APIs to allow integration within existing IT landscapes.

How can organizations get started with decision intelligence?

No matter the use case or the business unit, solutions for smart decision-making on every level can deliver immediate value with Quantexa's Decision Intelligence platform. Using this repeatable framework, organizations can:

Unlock value from day one

Pick another line of business and a use case, and continue building out the data foundation as part of your existing infrastructure.

Continue optimizing

With a unified data foundation and additional use cases, a culture of continual optimization takes over, as faster, confident decision-making becomes the norm.

Drive decision maturity

Continually increase your organization’s capabilities by deploying new technology, along with learning and certification opportunities for your workforce.

Become resilient and agile

Your data foundation is ready for any use case – giving your organization flexibility, resiliency, and agility to address any threat or opportunity.

What is the future outlook for decision intelligence?

As we look to the future, technologies will continue to evolve, providing decision-makers with even better tools with which to understand their customers to create more value, discover new markets and revenue opportunities, and increase their competitive advantage through better decision-making.

Adopting Decision Intelligence technologies will not become a substitute for human thinking, however. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Technology and automation delivered through DI platforms will provide a deeper understanding of the decision-making process itself thereby increasing the capabilities of decision-makers, and guiding them through reliable data to make the best decisions possible.

As Gartner recently summarized, "in times of increasing complexity and uncertainty, decision-making as an organizational capability will become a main competitive differentiator. Those who are able to make better, faster decisions will win in the market."

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