The modern business world is constantly and rapidly evolving and the environment organisations operate in steadily generates enormous amounts of data. Business analysts have to continuously develop and expand their skill set if they are to be successful at what they do and bring value to the organisations they work for.
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has led to the emergence of powerful AI tools that can provide invaluable assistance to BAs everywhere and help them unlock the full potential of available data, improve decision-making, and, ultimately, deliver better solutions.
As some of the best AI tools combine machine learning, advanced analytics, and data visualisation, they allow analysts to extract more meaningful information from unstructured data, simplify complex tasks, make better predictions, identify trends, opportunities, and risks; as well as improve communication within the team and with all involved stakeholders.
Below, we will shortlist the best AI tools for business analysts, explaining their features and how the BAs can leverage them to become more efficient in developing business strategies and driving business growth.
Table of Contents
Tableau
Tableau
is a powerful data visualisation business intelligence platform helping business analysts effortlessly interact with and analyse data. Plus, it allows them to present the data in a visually appealing and easy-to-understand manner.
By using some of the numerous Tableau features business analysts can create reports and interactive dashboards, making the data easy to explore and communicate to other stakeholders. uncover valuable insights, Thanks to the integration with machine learning algorithms, Tableau has advanced analytics capabilities, providing a deeper understanding of data, helping discover more valuable insights, and assisting analysts in making data-driven decisions based on those insights.
The platform also has some additional AI-powered features, such as AskData, which can help even nontechnical users to ask questions in plain language and receive immediate visual responses.
Another characteristic making Tableau extremely useful for business analysis is its scalability and implacable performance, meaning that it can handle even very extensive data sets and quickly perform highly complex calculations, which is particularly important when working on larger projects.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT has quickly become the most popular AI tool worldwide and for a good reason. It’s very user-friendly and easy to use, but still immensely powerful and efficient, especially when it comes to some of the tasks business analysts encounter on every project.
ChatGPT, with its Natural Language Processing capabilities, can provide valuable support for business analysts in gathering, exploring, and analysing data, gaining insights, and making well-informed decisions.
However, this tool can also be of great help in some of the more advanced tasks. Business analysts can use ChatGPT to elicit and analyse requirements, for process and data modelling, to identify and specify information on functional specifications, to create and break down user cases, and work on business strategy.
Furthermore, ChatGPT can serve as a great communication and management tool as it can help create reports, presentations, and similar materials based on information gathered from stakeholders. Business analyst can use ChatGPT prompts to aid their work and improve on productivity.
IBM Watson
IBM Watson, a suite of artificial intelligence tools from one of the largest tech companies in the world, offers multiple opportunities for business analysts to leverage its features in their work and optimise the decision-making process.
The software is mainly intended for professionals who work with large amounts of unstructured data, so it’s understandable how useful it can be for business analysts. Using Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning algorithms, IBM Watson assists in analysing and processing various forms of data, including text, images, and audio.
In addition, it’s a collaborative platform, so it facilitates cooperation between multiple teams and various stakeholders. On top of this, IBM Watson features powerful tools for data visualisation so patterns and trends are much easier to identify, even when working with massive volumes of data.
Qlik Sense
Qlik Sense is a business intelligence tool offering multiple options to explore, analyse, store, and visualise data. It’s rather intuitive and allows interactive exploration and analysis, with less of a steep learning curve compared to some other similar tools.
Qlik Sense can also assist business analysts by providing AI-powered suggestions and recommendations making it easy to discover valuable findings among the sets of data. Analysts can visualise and share data with team members and other stakeholders through collaborative and customisable dashboards, allowing them to present information in a visually appealing and engaging manner.
On top of this, as it’s based on machine learning models with real-time integration, Qlik Sense can help business analysts analyse calculations and make better predictions.
RapidMiner
Another valuable and powerful data management tool, RapidMiner is a comprehensive platform helping business analysts analyse the combined influence of various factors within the organisation, such as data, employees, or expertise.
It’s very easy to use, so even BAs with no coding knowledge will have no issues using this tool to its full extent, mainly thanks to its user-friendly drag-and-drop interface that significantly simplifies data analysis. As it features predictive mode building, automation of data preparation, and an extensive library of pre-built AI models, RapidMiner also allows analysts to streamline their workflow and be more efficient.
All this makes extraction of insights from data much easier, while its collaborative features help facilitate teamwork and increase productivity.
MonkeyLearn
In its essence, MonkeyLearn is a no-code, AI-powered tool providing NLP services and text analysis. Using machine learning models, the platform allows its users to easily gather and extract valuable insights from textual data and visualise and organise the available information.
As MonkeyLearn has a very user-friendly interface even the less advanced users can build, train, and deploy different customised machine learning models that they can use for various types of analysis.
Some of the main features offered by MonkeyLearn that business analysts may be interested in include text classification, sentiment analysis, and entity and keyword extraction. Another advantage of this platform is that it comes with multiple integrations, so it will work smoothly and integrate seamlessly with any existing tools you may have already used.
Splunk
The best use business analysis may have from the Splunk platform is to extract actionable insights from the available data.
A nice feature of Splunk is that you can practically use it from anywhere, within or outside the organisation’s premises, and using different devices (such as mobile phones, smart TVs, or augmented reality devices) which is very helpful in facilitating teamwork and collaboration between various stakeholders.
Additionally, the platform is capable of collecting, processing, and distributing data from various sources in real time, meaning that the analysis will always be up to date and the analysis will be able to timely identify different trends, opportunities, or risks.
PowerBI
An AI-powered tool from Microsoft, PowerBI is a comprehensive analytic platform particularly useful for business analysts as it allows them to easily gather data from various sources, explore it, and present it in visual form, simplifying insight extraction.
PowerBi’s AI capabilities include natural language querying, which allows analysts to ask questions about the data in plain English and receive meaningful insights, so no particular coding knowledge is needed. Users can also build their own machine learning models and use other AI-powered features to explore and analyse data.
As it comes from Microsoft, PowerBI supports multiple integrations with platforms and tools from the same company, such as Azure Machine Learning or Excel.
DataRobot
An automated machine learning platform powered by AI, DataRobot enables BAs to build predictive models quickly and efficiently. It automates the model selection, feature engineering, and hyper-parameter tuning processes so that business analysts can focus on interpreting the results rather than spending time on manual model development.
This significantly increases productivity and makes the whole work process of an analyst more streamlined and efficient. DataRobot helps analysts to leverage the power of machine learning without the need for particular coding or data science expertise.
H2O.ai
H2O.ai offers business analysts a wide range of AI and machine learning tools to improve their efficiency and decision-making. H2O Driverless AI, a popular tool on this platform, automates most of the machine learning tasks, including data preparation, feature engineering, and model selection.
It also provides interpretability features, allowing analysts to understand the logic behind model predictions and better understand the current trends. H2O-3, another tool offered by H2O.ai, is an open-source machine learning platform that provides a comprehensive set of algorithms and tools for data analysis and model development.
H2O is also another platform that allows business analysts to quickly and without too much hassle develop and deploy models without a significant experience or expertise in data science.
Databricks
Databricks is a unified analytics platform powered by AI that combines data engineering, data science, and business analytics. It provides a collaborative environment where business analysts can work alongside data engineers and data scientists.
Databricks simplifies data preparation, enables analysts to build and deploy machine learning models, and supports interactive data exploration and visualisation. With its scalable infrastructure and integration with popular tools like Apache Spark, Databricks empowers business analysts to leverage AI and big data technologies for advanced analytics tasks.
Sisense
Sisense is another one in the line of powerful business intelligence and analytics platforms that enable business analysts to explore complex data from large data sets and derive actionable insights. Its AI-powered analytics capabilities make analysts’ jobs significantly easier as Sisense can automate data preparation, blending, and visualisation, allowing analysts to uncover patterns and trends in real time.
Sisense offers a user-friendly interface, advanced data modelling, and natural language querying, so it is accessible for analysts across skill levels. With Sisense, business analysts can easily create interactive dashboards, share insights, and make data-driven decisions to drive organisational growth.
Azure Machine Learning
Another powerful AI platform provided by Microsoft on our list, Azure Machine Learning is a cloud-based service that simplifies the development and deployment of machine learning models for various purposes, including data gathering, analysis, and sharing.
It offers a drag-and-drop interface, automated machine learning capabilities, and integration with other Azure services. Business analysts can leverage Azure Machine Learning to build predictive models, generate insights, and operationalise machine learning workflows seamlessly.
Alteryx
Alteryx is a data preparation and blending tool based on artificial intelligence that allows business analysts to combine, clean, and transform data from multiple sources. It makes the data preparation process much simpler through a drag-and-drop interface and enables analysts to create repeatable workflows.
Alteryx also provides a range of advanced analytics tools, including predictive modelling, spatial analysis, and text mining, empowering analysts to derive actionable insights from data.
TimeHero
Besides analysing needs and requirements in the organisation and developing strategies and solutions based on data, a huge part of a business analyst’s job is communication, management, and facilitation of collaboration between stakeholders.
This is where AI tools such as TimeHero can prove to be extremely useful. TimeHero is an AI-powered task management platform whose main purpose is to make sure that teams are well-organised and working together towards a common goal.
Artificial intelligence in this tool helps users by automatically scheduling their tasks, sending alerts when projects and various tasks are due, assigning jobs to different team members based on their expertise, workload, and availability, and predicting timelines.
Individual users of the platform can easily sync their calendars with those of their team, so the collaboration is more efficient as team members can work around each other’s schedules.
Fireflies.ai
Acting as an AI meeting assistant, Fireflies.ai provides business analysts with a range of features that enhance collaboration and streamline the note-taking process. As it can capture both video and audio, Fireflies.ai can generate accurate transcripts in just minutes.
Its AI-powered search function allows users to quickly find specific information from lengthy meetings, enabling them to review an hour-long call in under five minutes. The collaborative nature of Fireflies.ai is best seen in its seamless teamwork features. Users can add comments, highlight key points, and assign action items directly within the live transcript, making it an ideal platform for effective team collaboration.
Furthermore, Fireflies.ai offers integrations with various platforms and a Chrome extension, making it easy to record and transcribe meetings across different web-conferencing tools. With FIreflies.ai, business analysts can focus on actively participating in discussions while Fireflies.ai handles the task of recording, transcribing, and organising the conversations.
This AI tool empowers teams to efficiently extract insights, share knowledge, and drive action based on the valuable information captured in meetings.
Pace AI
Pace AI is a new product that is intended for business analyst and product managers to aid their productivity.
The AI tool supports the generation and delivery of documentation and ideas in seconds instead of days with the power of AI to support business analysts and product managers.
Pace AI supports diagramming of techniques such as flowcharts, mind maps, user journeys.
Pace AI will help you with articulating requirements and reduce mundane tasks that can be removed using AI.
Pace AI is powered by the same technology used by ChatGPT.