Artificial Intelligence

A new approach todata analytics

Search-driven analytics puts the power of AI in the hands of evennontechnical employees

B

LOOMBERG REPORTED
THAT the federal government

spent $2.6 billion on tools tomanage, analyze and visualize data in fiscal
2019. Even with that amount of spending,however, agencies are not able to properly
leverage their data for informed decisionmaking and mission effectiveness.
The current process for creating reports
and finding insights in data depends on
those with technical skills and is complex,
slow and inflexible. Reports are often built
on an aggregated view of the data, anddashboards rarely address everybody’s
needs. So users end up with a staticsnapshot that leaves the next questionunanswered.

because they can quickly identify where thepeople with the right skill sets are locatedand where the equipment is. Combined with
their own situational awareness, they canthen determine the most efficient way to
deploy those resources.

Using data to solve real-world
problems
I’d like to share a story that Jose Arrieta,
CIO of the Department of Health andHuman Services, often uses to talk about
the importance of using data. Imagine a
recently divorced mother who lives in rural

Monica McEwen

Vice President, Public Sector,
ThoughtSpot

upstate New York. When she hurts her backon the job, she’s prescribed an opioid. She
spirals into opioid addiction, becomes very
sick and develops life-threatening sepsis.
The small local hospital is unable to treat
her so she is airlifted to a larger hospital ina nearby city, and doctors there are forced
to put her on an array of harmful drugs tokeep her alive while they wait for lab results
to confirm the most effective medication.
Now imagine if you incorporate AI
into that story. Applying AI to social
determinants could have signaled apotential mental health issue, making

A key tool in tackling those challenges isnatural language search, which we use withGoogle, Amazon and a host of other tools
in our everyday lives to instantly answer
a variety of questions. When applied toenterprise datasets, the familiarity of searchhelps speed decision-making and bridge thetalent gap because it reduces the need fortraining. This, in turn, empowers agency
employees to engage with data in a moreagile, productive way.
People aren’t equipped to manually siftthrough massive amounts of data to findpatterns. But we thrive when it comes tointerpreting those patterns and identifying
the best path forward. When you augmenthuman skills with technology, you get thebest of both worlds.
With search-driven analytics, logisticians
could more rapidly prepare for military
deployments or humanitarian relief efforts
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People aren’t equipped to manually siftthrough massive amounts of data to findpatterns. But we thrive when it comes tointerpreting those patterns.
doctors aware that their patient might be atrisk of opioid abuse before they prescribed
the medicine. AI could also analyze otherdata so the doctors could quickly identify
the best treatment before her healthdeteriorated.
More broadly, AI applied to data, oraugmented analytics, can also identify
underlying trends in our current opioid
crisis and allow officials to react before

a community finds itself in crisis. Usinga publicly available Drug Enforcement
Administration dataset, ThoughtSpot’s
platform took only seven seconds toanalyze 21 billion rows of data and identify
17 outliers, including the providers anddistributors that had been overprescribing
opioids. Imagine the potential for applying
this kind of technology not just to DEA
data, but to datasets from any agency —truly allowing users to find that “needle in ahaystack.”
With platforms like ThoughtSpot, evennontechnical users can leverage the powerof AI to overcome government’s biggest
challenges and, in doing so, create a better
America for us all.
Monica McEwen is vice president ofpublic sector at ThoughtSpot.

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