M+E Daily

MicroStrategy will be introducing generative artificial intelligence (AI) to data analytics as part of the new AI capabilities that will be available exclusively in MicroStrategy ONE, its new cloud-native, AI-infused analytics platform, according to the company.

On June 28, during the webinar “MicroStrategy and ChatGPT: A Roadmap Discussion,” Sheng Zhao, VP, product owner at MicroStrategy, and Loc Nguyen, VP, product management at MicroStrategy, provided a behind-the-scenes, exclusive look at what the company called the “most anticipated roadmap item to date”: future integration with ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that everybody in the industry has been talking about for months.

Among other things, they explained how MicroStrategy plans to: integrate the language-based model to answer questions, deliver dynamic data stories and make data insights more accessible for all users.

“I believe at this point everyone has used ChatGPT as a tool,” Zhao said, noting how “powerful” the technology is. “Only two months after launching the service, they reached 200 million active monthly users, which is actually a record in history for [a] consumer-based application.”

People who are creative are using ChatGPT to generate content and if you know how to create application programming interfaces (APIs), you can build applications, he said.

“For me personally, I have been trying to use ChatGPT to do something I’ve never done…. I never created a Chrome plugin.” So, one day, he decided to do that and was able to do so in just a half hour using ChatGPT, he said. “Imagine how much time it would take for me to actually write the plugin.”

All these activities are “going to drive innovation,” he predicted. “Everybody is going to be creative. And then there’s not really [many] secrets [to] building a language model now. Everybody can actually speed up, try different things and then, eventually, with all the competition, that’s going to drive down the cost of adopting language models.”

The company then moved on to a discussion on the ChatGPT/AI roadmap.

“I want to anchor the conversation around how AI can be leveraged to enhance existing [business intelligence] workstreams, thereby elevating the user experience and analytics,” Nguyen told viewers.

“And I want to organize it around three key personas that AI can help support. For the business users, [they’re focused] on accessing information, gaining deeper insights to make better decision,” he said. “For the analyst community, they focus on advanced data exploration and care very much about the ease of the authoring experience.  And lastly, for your architects and admins, they focus on efficient platform management and the ease of semantic graph design.”

At MicroStrategy, he added: “We believe that generative AI can help all of these user profiles enhance their experience within our BI ecosystem…. And, thanks to our recent advancement in automated insights, MicroStrategy insights now makes it really easy to track data points, spot trends and outliers and deliver useful insights.”

But he pointed out: “What if we could take it a step further? By integrating generative AI, we can enable business users to ask questions about their data views and receive answers in natural language that is easy to understand.”