Stephen Wolfram, the man who made Siri possible on the iPhone, has a data analysis tool on offer that could allow business leaders “to ask more questions about topics with less concerns about cost.” Wolfram Alpha Enterprise is built on “a continuously updated library of trillions of data points and AI-driven computational models” that would allow nontechnical people to make data-driven decisions quickly and cheaply.
Sara Castellanos explains how Wolfram Alpha makes it easier to analyze trends in this article from the Wall Street Journal:
The website, trained on massive amounts of information about the world, can answer questions that require an understanding of context, inference and calculations. This allows it to answer questions such as: “How was the weather in the Big Apple when Beyoncé turned 35?”
It uses natural language understanding, a form of artificial intelligence, to understand the intent and context of a user’s plain-spoken query. It draws on a library of tens of thousands of algorithms, including machine learning algorithms, to answer a question. Machine learning is the science of getting computers to act intelligently without being explicitly programmed.
Today, Wolfram Alpha is capable of answering a vast range of questions, from computing the properties of a black hole to determining how long it takes to cook a turkey.
Wolfram Alpha Enterprise has been in existence for about three years and is beginning to attract enterprise-level business clients. To date, there are about 10 corporate users, including some members of the Fortune 100, according to a company spokesman. The enterprise product builds on the existing Wolfram Alpha algorithms to answer business questions.
[…]
Gartner analyst Rita Sallam said the software falls into the category of “augmented analytics.” These tools use machine learning to make it easier to analyze data for nontechnical employees and reduce the need to rely on scarce data scientists.
By 2020, more than 40% of data science tasks will be automated with tools that include augmented analytics, according to Gartner.
