A Guide to Business Intelligence Trends for 2023

By Naren Vijay
The global business intelligence industry successfully consolidated its gains in 2022 that began from the accelerated adoption of BI tools due to the pandemic. The adoption is expected to continue to rise in 2023, with more businesses realising the importance of effective data management and its role in driving insight-based decision-making processes.

The global business intelligence industry is expected to grow from $23.1 billion in 2020, with a 7.6 per cent CAGR, reaching close to $33.3 billion by 2025. The data explosion and increasing data literacy have shaped data-driven cultures in organisations of all sizes. With data being generated from multiple sources and its increasing importance in business operations, organisations must effectively utilise data and insights in day-to-day decision-making.

Here are some key business intelligence trends that will be in focus in 2023:

Automation
Business intelligence helps businesses automate several otherwise tedious and time-consuming tasks. Using multiple tools and technologies like AI and machine learning along with low-code and no-code frameworks, it has become possible for businesses to rely on business intelligence for data automation.
The evolving capabilities of business intelligence platforms will continue to play an integral role in automation in 2023, and companies will be able to achieve hyper-automation mode for several operational requirements.

Augmented Analytics
Integrating modern technologies like AI and machine learning makes it easier for businesses to allow non-technical team members to harness the power of business intelligence. Augmented analytics enables the entire team to create advanced data analytics models and derive valuable insights from them without wasting much time.
The increasing accessibility of data analytics by asking the right questions and providing contextual suggestions for relevant insights, make it one of the most sought-after features in any business intelligence platform. As it helps a business to handle the complexity and scale of data by seamless data collection, cleaning and insight generation, it will continue to make an impact in 2023.

Predictive Intelligence
Predictive intelligence has been one of the most discussed topics among BI professionals. As it allows a business to understand the possible outcomes and can act as a guiding force, it has the potential to be the main focus of business intelligence in 2023. However, a business needs to gather adequate data and build reliable future estimates for the platform to come up with suggested alternative scenarios and effective risk management.
Predictive intelligence is expected to be increasingly used to identify opportunities and challenges for a business. Businesses will likely recognise more compelling use cases for predictive intelligence, and it will play a more critical role in the business intelligence ecosystem.

NLP-based features for data democratisation
Using natural language processing (NLP) in business intelligence is helping companies to democratise data and make sense of unstructured and semi-structured data. Irrespective of the level of technical expertise, using NLP in business processes can provide real-time business intelligence to end users, thus making insight-generation and data-driven decision-making more straightforward for businesses.

As computers get better at understanding human language and the context of the queries, NLP will continue to drive the acceptability of the increasing importance of business intelligence in 2023.

AI-powered Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is likely to play a more active role in the business intelligence ecosystem in the coming year. The demand for real-time online data analysis is increasing among businesses, and business intelligence platforms are expected to develop sophisticated adaptive AI models that will be flexible and adjust to real-world changes.

According to an analysis by Gartner, businesses that can build adaptive AI capabilities by 2026 will be able to outperform the competition in operationalising AI models by at least 25 per cent. AI will emerge as a more reliable and scalable technology that can achieve much more for organisations.

Conversational Intelligence
The use of conversational intelligence is likely to increase in various business functions in 2023. It allows AI-powered business intelligence systems to analyse speech or text and help derive insights to push business growth.
It is anticipated that several other departments will use conversational analytics apart from marketing and sales to deliver better business performance. At the same time, the level of sophistication in conversational intelligence is expected to go through a learning curve.

Industries like e-commerce, retail, manufacturing, automotive, healthcare, logistics, financial services and energy are expected to be the big believers in business intelligence. The year 2023 will continue to be an exciting period for business intelligence platforms and businesses that aim to increase their data management and processing capabilities.

While it is difficult to ascertain the exact route the various capabilities of a business intelligence platform will take in the future, the trends highlighted here will inevitably figure in critical ways that will shape the conversation around business intelligence.