Last week, Domo was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Augmented BI Platforms, Q3 2021 report, which is designed to help business insights professionals in their BI-vendor-selection journeys. 
 
Augmented BI has become something that modern organizations need from BI because its features “go beyond reporting, querying, data visualizations, and basic descriptive and diagnostic analytics,” the report stated.  
 
“Augmented BI introduces vital emerging capabilities,” it continued, “empowering users to become citizen data scientists drawing on the power of ML (machine learning) and broadening the reach of data and analytics to all decision-makers via conversational UIs (user interfaces).” 
 
We see in our customer base every day how augmented BI enables faster decision-making among all business users, which in turn differentiates companies and makes them more competitive in market.  
 
In fact, when we look closely at our customers, we see three macro trends that support why there’s never been a better time for such a platform than now.

1 – Data science can have a positive impact across every area of the business  
 
Data science is a key piece of augmented BI because it’s just so powerful. It harnesses alerts, ML algorithms, natural language processing (NLP), predictive analytics, and other AI technologies to produce insights faster and more accurately, which is critical to determining what’s next for your business. 
 
What’s more, data science can be—and is being—democratized. With Domo, data science outcomes are delivered in a highly consumable way through a rich and easy-to-use UI, which has created a whole new audience of people capable of putting ML outputs to work. 
 
When the technical power of data science is at the fingertips of a culture empowered to use it, important business questions get answered. Just ask:

• The National Basketball Association (NBA), which is now able to accurately estimate the viewership of every single game (and therefore determine which games should be broadcast on which networks);
• Freddy’s Frozen Custard & Steakburgers, which can better predict staffing needs to support its store performance goals; or
• Human capital management (HCM) software provider Asure, which was able to reduce customer churn and increase prospect conversion.

In other words, data science has the ability to solve big problems and deliver better outcomes across any type of business. And that’s exactly what it’s doing.

2 – Professional data scientists are in short supply 
 
And the demands on them keep getting greater. With an augmented BI platform, you get more leverage from your existing team of data professionals while being able to easily apply data-science capabilities to the growing number of use cases across your business. 
 
Your data scientists will benefit from augmented BI, too—because instead of spending their time on laborious projects that could be automated, they get to think on a higher order and focus on providing actual guidance to the organization, which of course helps drive the business forward. 
 
“When I talk to data scientists about augmented BI in Domo, they get really excited, because they no longer have to spend all this time chasing down the right data, figuring out who owns it, and cleaning it for their business question,” said Dr. Ben Ainscough, Domo’s head of AI and data science.  
 
“Domo’s augmented BI capabilities not only greatly expedite those processes for them, but they help them get their technical tasks done much faster. That allows them to spend more time communicating their insights in a way the business will best understand. The possibilities are now endless as far as what they get to explore and work on. And that’s a win for them, and for the company.” 
 
3 – The need for custom apps is growing fast 
 
According to International Data Corporation (IDC), which specializes in tracking technology trends, more than 500 million digital apps and services will be developed and deployed in the five-year period ending in 2023. 
 
The reasons for the explosion are simple: apps are becoming the primary way that business users interact with data because they tell a more complete story than charts and graphs do; and apps are a great way for organizations large and small to stay competitive because they help modernize business processes.

With augmented BI platforms, you can build and deploy apps to modernize businesses processes in less time and with fewer resources than traditional methods require.  
 
A great example is Yum! Brands, a Domo customer that needed an app to track its diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) initiatives. 

Yum! could have outsourced development, but because all the data was accessible with Domo and Domo offered the tools it needed, the company was able to build and deploy its app on the Domo platform in just a few weeks—and at a fraction of what it would have cost the organization to build and deploy it itself. 
 
The Wave goes into greater detail about augmented BI, and reveals how the most significant providers of such platforms measure up. To download the report, click here.