Mr. Puneet Agarwal, VP & Head of India Engineering, ThoughtSpot, a Modern Analytic Cloud Company with a mission of creating fact-driven world with easiest to use analytics platform; is in conversation with Indianext about the importance of Data and Analytics in today’s business ecosystem.
Q1. According to you, how important is Data in recent times?
Data has never been more important. Now more than ever, organizations in every sector need to use data to drive decisions. The pandemic has shown the critical role data must play in shaping policies, delivering vaccines, and dictating how we safely engage with one another. The business world, too, has been fundamentally reshaped by data. The last decade has seen the most significant transformation in how businesses run in our lifetimes. From the rise of new business models like streaming services to the way we buy goods for our homes, new technology, underpinned by data, has rewritten the rules of business. The pandemic only accelerated this wholesale shift to a data-driven economy.
For consumers and society at large, this ultimately has proven highly beneficial. By leveraging data more effectively, businesses are able to end the tyranny of averages and treat customers as individuals with bespokes, personalized experiences. That’s only possible when data is leveraged at every level of an organization, not just at the executive team or C-suite. This pervasive use of data-driven insights, powered by consumer-grade analytics, has become an imperative for businesses.
Q2. How is analytics changing the current business scenario?
Analytics isn’t a new concept. The notion that – facts, based on data, can help businesses make better decisions has been around for years. What is new, however, is the absolute requirement that business users at every level of an organization are empowered with analytics. Owing to the credits to the innovations done in search, cloud, NLP, and AI, it’s finally time to empower decision-makers at every level with the ability to make data-driven decisions. This is the heart of digital transformation, creating opportunities to deliver personalized experiences to customers, drive efficiency, and improve products and services more quickly and effectively than ever before.
Companies failing to reimagine how they put the power of analytics in the hands of their entire organization are facing some of the most serious competitive pressure we’ve ever seen. At the same time, those building their businesses on data are thriving, growing at an incredible rate while transforming the world around us. As we gather more and more data, both in volume and variety, the impact of the companies taking advantage of this data throughout their business will pull further and further ahead.
Q3. Tell us about your product and solutions.
ThoughtSpot is the Modern Analytics Cloud Company. With our platform, anyone, regardless of their technical sophistication or skills, can leverage their cloud data to create, consume, and operationalize data-driven insights. Our consumer-grade search and AI technology deliver true self-service analytics that anyone can use, while our developer-friendly platform ThoughtSpot Everywhere makes it easy to build interactive data apps that bring the power of ThoughtSpot to the entire cloud data ecosystem.
With ThoughtSpot, modern businesses deliver the simplest, most engaging, and instantly actionable analytics solutions to every user possible. It’s an open data ecosystem that puts the power of the modern data stack into the hands of everyone.
With the launch of ThoughtSpot Everywhere, we made it easy for developers to build this same experience in their own apps and products. ThoughtSpot Everywhere’s low-code platform makes all this possible with minimal engineering overhead. And thanks to our new and expanded APIs, you can even use insights to automatically trigger actions and workflows in other applications and services, operationalizing insights across your business like never before.
Q4. Now, are you integrating AI with your solutions?
AI is infused into every part of ThoughtSpot to deliver a simple and intelligent user experience. We use natural language search, for example, which requires AI, to translate questions into queries that can then return answers. This is the core of search, which is at the heart of our platform. And our algorithms continue to learn based on usage to personalize the search experience for every user.
There’s also SpotIQ, which helps users answer questions they didn’t even know to ask. By simply pointing SpotIQ at a topic, question, or answer, thousands of additional questions are automatically generated and asked. The answers are then filtered through different machine learning algorithms to detect trends, anomalies and patterns, with interesting insights returned. As more users search to analyze their data in ThoughtSpot, SpotIQ learns what’s important and tunes its algorithms to provide more relevant insights. The more people and data in ThoughtSpot, the smarter it gets.
