Analytics
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By Brad Shaw and
We are excited to announce the Alteryx Auto Insights Playbooks feature. Playbooks leverages the Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Open AI Service to make you better at your job by identifying high-value analytics use cases based on your data or tailored to your specific company, role or business problem. Playbooks can automatically generate a realistic synthetic (artificial) dataset tailored to your selected use case or scan your dataset and suggest use cases and automatically build a Report (which we call a Mission) in minutes!
Analytics professionals need to measure what matters, to find opportunities, patterns, and insights about the business for better decision-making. Despite this objective, analysts are seldom domain experts and often struggle to understand the most critical use cases for their customers/end users. And even if they are, as businesses evolve, new use cases emerge that are ripe for analytics and insights.
In a similar fashion, line of business experts are seldom data experts and can struggle to turn vision into reality without deep technical skillsets. Use case identification, selection, and proof of concept development are manual labor intensive and challenging parts of the analytics lifecycle – with limited opportunity for automation… until now.
Playbooks caters to users at all levels throughout your organization, from the analyst to the analytics leader:
- For the Analyst: Playbooks automates the manually intensive process of identifying, selecting, and building new analytics use cases for end users. Playbooks saves time and effort for analysts through automated use case generation and automated sample dataset generation.
- For the Line of Business Leader / Professional: Playbooks automates the identification of high-value use cases and creates an understanding of how to apply analytics in their organization using Auto Insights.
- For the Analytics Leader: Playbooks automates the manually intensive process of investigating & selecting use cases for analytics development. Analytics leaders can use this output to vet their own service catalog or to ideate and establish new deliverables for the business.
How does it work?
There are two ways to use Playbooks:
- By entering a scenario (i.e. your role, company and/or business problem “Sustainability Manager at Lego trying to reduce waste during the production process”). Playbooks will then generate use cases that match the scenario. After a use case has been selected the user can choose from a variety of Reports that help address the use case. Once a Report is selected Playbooks generates a synthetic (artificial) dataset and uses that to build a Report (we call them Missions).
- By selecting a dataset (from a list of available datasets). Playbooks will then generate use cases that can be solved with the dataset. After selecting a use case and an available granularity (daily, weekly, monthly etc.) Playbooks will then automatically build a Report.
Each functionality (scenario input or dataset selection) can be enabled separately, meaning that Playbooks can just have the scenario input or just the dataset selection enabled or they can be enabled together.
And if the first round of results doesn’t quite hit the mark, it’s easy to adjust the scenario and iterate to improve and refine the use cases that are presented.
Data Privacy
At Alteryx, data privacy is of paramount importance to us. We believe in maintaining transparency and clarity when it comes to the information that is shared between Alteryx and the Microsoft Azure Cognitive services API to generate tailored use cases, datasets and reports.
Playbooks works by connecting to Open AI via the Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services within the Alteryx Azure environment. Several API calls are executed as the user browses through the Playbooks interface to generate use cases, synthetic data and reports. Read more about the Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Open AI Service, including the FAQ here.
Only the scenario input provided by the user (e.g. “A Sales Manager within Consumer Electronics at Best Buy”) or the dataset structure and some randomized samples are sent to Open AI. All other content shown within Playbooks is generated by Open AI.
Conclusion
Playbooks is available now within Alteryx Auto Insights and will make you and your team better at your job by being able to perform each of the following tasks like a boss!
- Identify use case(s) for Auto Insights based of your data or tailored to your specific role, company and/or business objective.
- Demonstrate the value of Auto Insights through relevant use cases and tailored Reports.
- Understand how datasets should be structured to produce meaningful results in Auto Insights.
