By Pratik Jain, Senior Technical Architect at Kyvos Insights
Most people find preparing their tax returns cumbersome, even when several online tools are available which promise to simplify the process. Filers have questions on applicable tax regulations or their options and find the software’s calculated reports to be cryptic. In response, some tools have now introduced an AI summary that presents the same tax report in simplified language and explains the calculations and formats which make it easy and human.
The evolution of conversational analytics from dashboards is prodded by the same human need – that of simplicity so that anyone, regardless of technical (or taxation) skill, can understand data easily and interact with it.
Why Dashboards No Longer Do the Job
For decades, analytics and BI tools have used data visualization within dashboards to make insights easy to understand. Instead of rows and columns of numbers, dashboards present data visually in the form of graphical charts, KPI monitors and trend lines to aid comprehension and quick response.
However, visualization alone does not solve for ease. Dashboards still assume that users know where to look, what filters to apply and how to read the results. For the average business user, that can often be a stretch.
Moreover, dashboards were static in the old era. They had answers to predefined questions, but when business situations changed, users needed to wait for a data team to make modifications to reports and dashboards. This dependency on data analysts costs opportunities in today’s fast-paced environments.
Dashboards also demand a clear idea of what you’re looking for before you begin, which may not always be the case. The expectation today isn’t just to visualize the data picture. It is to interact with it, question it, explore alternatives and get immediate, trustworthy answers. As business users grow more impatient for answers, dashboards start to feel like a bottleneck that restricts open conversations between users and their data.
BI platforms evolved in response. Dashboards were redesigned to be flexible and self-configurable. Widgets let users personalize their own views. This allowed some degree of freedom, facilitating data exploration from multiple perspectives and speeding up insight delivery. Widgets, however, still require users to define what they want – the metric, the dimension and the filter logic. Many users do not know what to look or ask for, so this approach soon hit limitations.
Conversational Analytics
The solution lies in using a fundamentally different approach to getting answers and conversational analytics empowers this shift. It lets users ask questions in plain English, and receive instant, contextual responses. Insights from charts and tables are presented as a crisp summary. Turing dashboards into fluid dialog windows removes the unspoken cognitive load of BI tools.
Designed for simplicity, fast access to insights and true self-service, it democratizes insights, with everyone possessing the ability to make data-informed decisions quickly and confidently, without needing technical expertise.
Watch out for Wannabees
While the BI marketplace has many conversational analytics tools, not all can claim to be enterprise ready. Impressive at first glance, GenAI-driven BI assistants may look good, letting users type a question and receive instant insights. However, they rely on surface-level connectors, often reading out from the pre-defined dashboards, without a deeper understanding of enterprise data models.
Moreover, misinterpretation and fabrication of answers is a big challenge while using GenAI. Incorrect or contextually irrelevant insights lead to wrong decisions, undermining confidence in the system. Accuracy, context-awareness and governance are non-negotiable for any enterprise-grade conversational analytics solution.
To deliver real value, conversational BI tools should not be just a chat interface but must understand the data and should scale securely.
Kyvos Dialogs Delivers a True Conversational Experience
Kyvos Dialogs is purpose-built to address the shortcomings of traditional and Gen AI driven BI chat interfaces that don’t go beyond surface-level. It enables a truly conversational BI experience that’s both intuitive and enterprise ready.
Dialogs allows users to ask questions in natural language and receive accurate, contextual responses. The conversational interface supports deeper analysis by allowing users to easily slice and filter data, and surfacing insights for quick comprehension using charts, tables and narrative summaries.
What sets Kyvos apart is the architecture on which the conversational interface is built. At its core it is driven by Kyvos’ industry-leading semantic layer. It is the powerhouse that stores all enterprise-specific hierarchies, metrics and data definitions. This enables the system to understand, interpret and process questions to a high degree of accuracy. Dialog’s responses are aligned with the organization’s unique business language and logic. The system intelligently selects the best-fit visualization and adds a business language explanation, which reduces the cognitive load of interpreting the insights.
In high-stakes environments, even a single wrong answer can undermine confidence in the system. Trust on data-driven decisions originates from the degree of accuracy of insights. Where the current industry response accuracy using conversational analytics averages at mid-fifties, Dialogs’ response precision is consistently over 90%.
Kyvos’ semantic intelligence layer also enables a high-performance querying engine that delivers fast, scalable access to data, even at massive volumes. At the same time, it also maintains standardized, governed and secure role-based access to sensitive data. Having these capabilities built into its foundational layer powers Kyvos Dialogs to deliver unprecedented speed, accuracy and security.
Use Cases and Benefits
The shift to conversational analytics is not a plain-vanilla technological upgrade. It fundamentally changes decision-making across the organization. With conversational analytics, business leaders can ask complex questions like “How did Q2 sales in the North American region compare to last year, broken down by channel?” They would get answers in real-time, without having to request a report and waiting for it.
They may start with routine questions like “What was yesterday’s conversion rate?” or “How many new customers signed up in Europe this month?” but continue to dig deeper into the data to analyze the root causes that could be causing deviations from planned targets. Kyvos Dialogs is able to retain the reference of the previous questions and maintain the contextual continuity on answers to secondary queries.
With routine, transactional interactions with data being handled directly by business users, analysts are freed up for higher-value tasks of building advanced models or exploring new trends.
Operational managers benefit from real-time decisions inputs that are data backed. For example, a supply chain manager who tries to assess inventory risk across multiple warehouses can ask “Which SKUs are at risk of stockout in the next 7 days?” and receive a clear, actionable response immediately. Traditional dashboards required them to interpret this information, applying multiple filters and joins. This is not just time consuming but also challenging for those who may not be data savvy. With conversational analytics, it becomes a simple task and significantly reduces executive decision latency to changing market conditions.
The Future is Conversational
Conversational analytics marks a shift from reporting cycles to real-time interactions, from pre-defined views to open-ended exploration. It enables users to engage with data directly, ask questions in natural language and receive instant, reliable answers with context and clarity. It does so with the governance, accuracy and performance that today’s decision-making requires. This ability to talk to data and trust the response, is defining the next generation of decision intelligence.
About Author:
Pratik Jain, Senior Technical Architect at Kyvos Insights. With over 20 years of experience in building high-performance analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, Pratik brings deep expertise in architecting and delivering scalable, enterprise-grade analytics products and platforms. As a Generative AI thought leader, Pratik has been instrumental in driving innovation across multiple product suites leveraging GenAI. He also heads the UX/UI strategy at Kyvos, ensuring seamless and intuitive user experiences across platforms.
Kyvos semantic intelligence accelerates all your BI and AI initiatives. The platform’s ultra-wide and deep data models deliver lightning-fast analytics at infinite scale, accuracy and maximum savings. It offers high-performance storage for structured or unstructured data and trusted data for AI applications.
The infrastructure-agnostic platform is critical for any modern data or AI stack, whether on-premises or on cloud. Leading enterprises use Kyvos as a universal source for conversational analytics, faster insights, unified access and scalable performance.
***