I'm delighted to announce the arrival of Cognos Analytics 12.0
In this release, IBM reaffirms its commitment in delivering a true self-service analytics experience. And we truly believe that artificial intelligence has a crucial role in achieving this objective.
In Cognos 12.0, we are introducing significant changes to our AI assistant, resulting in an enhanced experience and expanded capabilities. A new and intuitive interface to enable users to understand their data, uncover valuable business insights, generate visualizations, and seamlessly share them.
Experience our natural language interface, advanced caching and more at the June 8 launch event!
The Benefits of a Self-Service Analytics Experience
Self-service analytics empowers business users to access and analyze data without depending on technical teams or data experts. this means the users can get the insights they need, in the way and moment they need. It helps organizations to increase efficiency, enables line of business users to have faster and better decision-making, increase agility, encourages collaboration between business users and IT team, and definitely democratizes business analytics.
Why an Analytics Assistant is important?
One of the main challenges of all analytics and BI tools is to be user-friendly for people of different skills and roles. The AI assistant is a powerful tool that not only saves your time but can also help you with tasks that you might not even know how to do by yourself, especially when you are not very familiar with Business Analytics solutions. You definitely have a Copilot, able to interpret your requests in natural language and bring what you are asking.
For further insights into the specific tasks and inquiries that the assistant can address, I invite you to read my related blog post: How to use your CA AI Assistant? (And how can it be your co-pilot?)
What is new in Cognos Analytics Assistant in 12.0 release?
Layout
The first important change is the new layout. In addition to the traditional assistant positioned at the side (now shifted to the right instead of the left), users now have the option to leverage their Cognos Analytics Assistant in full screen mode. This innovative feature not only provides a seamless and immersive experience but also offers ample workspace to facilitate efficient and productive work.
Launch Anywhere
You now can open Cognos Analytics Assistant from anywhere, including the product home page. It has an icon in the upper-right corner of the screen. This prominent placement ensures easy access to the assistant from any point within the software. No matter where you are, you can now effortlessly launch the Cognos Analytics Assistant at your preferred moment, empowering you with timely and on-demand support
Guided Experience
As usual. we prioritized usability and user experience. In this release we bring a new UI that is incredibly user-friendly. Upon launching the assistant, you will immediately encounter a "how to start" guide, presenting you with a range of possible questions and actions to help you make the most of the tool. We have taken great care to ensure that using the assistant is a seamless and intuitive process.
Natural Language enhancements
Cognos assistant is bringing numerous enhancements to significantly improve its understanding capabilities. One notable improvement is the ability to ask comparative questions, enabling more insightful interactions. Here are a few examples:
- Compare marketing costs for the last 2 years
- Compare the average ticket of Store A and Store B
- What is the average ticket comparison between Store A and Store B?
The Assistant now also understands additional filters and modifiers such as above, highest, most, best and worst. For example, you can ask the Assistant the following:
- What city has the average ticket above 90.000?
- Which product has the highest revenue today?
- Which prduct has the worst NPS Score?
NARRATIVE INSIGHTS
Cognos Analytics uses Artificial Intelligence to generate natural language explanations for your data, making it easily understandable. In Cognos Analytics previous versions it was accessible in Cognos Exploration and Cognos Dashboard. What is exciting is that on 12.0 release the Cognos Analytics Assistant goes a step further by also providing narrative insights to explain the data and find outliers and key drivers that greatly enhance and expedite data analysis processes.
Learn more about Cognos Narrative Insights in my blog here or what Cognos Narrative Insights in 1 minute
The Assistant displays narrative insights automatically when generates an answer and any filters in the chart are also applied to the insights
Share visualizations from the Assistant
The Assistant now offers a Share option that enables you to choose a visualization provided by the Assistant and share it through Email, Microsoft Teams, or Slack. And before sharing it, you have the option to include a customized message and apply annotations or edits to enhance its clarity and relevance.
Create a complete or simple dashboard
Now, you have the ability to create a simple dashboard directly from the visualization provided by the Assistant. This new feature allows you to include only the specific visualization you select, without generating a comprehensive dashboard with numerous charts and widgets as it did before. This simplifies the process of creating a dashboard, focusing solely on the visualization you need.
However, the option to create a complete dashboard is still available. In such cases, Cognos Artificial Intelligence comes into play by identifying relevant and significant insights, and subsequently generating the complete dashboard for you. This feature allows for a more automated and efficient approach to dashboard creation, leveraging AI to highlight crucial information and present it in a comprehensive format.
You can also watch our video about getting started with The Assistant.
IBM's substantial investment in AI reflects its commitment to resolving user challenges and delivering an exceptional business experience. The robust Cognos Analytics AI capabilities provide a comprehensive suite of powerful features that streamline data analysis processes, elevate insights, and empower users to make data driven decisions with confidence. These advanced capabilities not only enhance productivity but also optimize decision-making outcomes, enabling businesses to stay ahead of the competition