MicroStrategy on Thursday announced new generative AI capabilities that enable customers to embed AI-powered insights within employee workflows.
The company first introduced HyperIntelligence, a zero-click embedded analytics tool that gives users BI insights at work, in 2019. Five years later, in March 2024, MicroStrategy unveiled Auto, an embeddable, generative AI-powered bot that can interact with data in any application using natural language.
New AI-powered insights, part of the latest MicroStrategy One release, combine HyperIntelligence and Auto, allowing users to dig deeper into the insights they receive from HyperIntelligence using Auto's generative AI capabilities.
Combining HyperIntelligence and Auto made sense, given that they existed separately within MicroStrategy's platform, according to Doug Henschen, an analyst at Constellation Research.
“Integrating the two technologies is the obvious next step,” he said. “Auto GenAI technology simplifies the delivery of natural language capabilities by reducing (or eliminating) all of the language curation steps and administrative tasks previously required.”
Tysons Corner, Virginia-based MicroStrategy is a longtime independent analytics vendor that, like many of its peers, has recently made generative AI a focus of its product development.
The company released its first set of generative AI capabilities in October 2023, including natural language queries and explanations, and natural language generation of code for creating data tables and working within databases. This was followed in March by the release of Auto, which extended MicroStrategy's generative AI capabilities beyond BI environments and made them embeddable.
All generative AI capabilities announced by MicroStrategy to date, including the new AI-powered insights, are generally available, differentiating the vendor from its peers.
Other vendors, including Qlik, Tableau, and ThoughtSpot, have introduced generative AI capabilities as well, but they were all in preview when the vendors first announced them. Some of the tools announced by competitors are still in preview, but many others, such as Tableau's Pulse and Domo's AI Model Management, are now generally available.
But Henschen said that while some generative AI tools are publicly available, they are still new and adoption is limited, so no vendor has yet gained a significant competitive advantage.
“There's a competition for vendor bragging rights, and MicroStrategy is one of the leaders,” Henschen says, “but what really matters is customer adoption and customers finding value in the capabilities. I think customer adoption is still in the early stages.”
New Features
The use of analytics within organizations has long been primarily the domain of trained data specialists, with studies finding that only about a quarter to a third of employees analyze data as part of their job duties.
The main reason is that analytics and data management platforms are difficult to use, as they require code to perform most tasks and data literacy training to interpret reports, dashboards, models, and other data products.
Two ways to expand analytics to more potential users are embedded BI and natural language processing (NLP).
Embedded BI presents data to users within their workflows, eliminating the need to switch between the BI platform and work applications, and reduces the need to know code by providing relevant data directly to users, while NLP allows users to interact with data using natural language instead of code.
However, both have drawbacks that make analytics inaccessible to nearly all users in an organization: NLP tools developed by data management and analytics vendors have limited vocabulary and do not enable true natural language interaction, while embedded BI still requires data literacy training.
Generative AI changes this by enabling true natural language interaction combined with the ability to interpret intent. As a result, generative AI has been mainstream in data management and analytics for over a year now, with many vendors developing tools that allow you to use generative AI with your own data.
However, most of the generative AI tools being developed by data management and analytics vendors can only be used within data management and BI environments, not embedded.
With the release of Auto Bots, MicroStrategy first combined generative AI with embedded BI, and now is adding the ability to deliver insights to its built-in generative AI.
HyperIntelligence provides users with contextual insights as they work through Hyper Cards, which are information boxes that pop up when users move their mouse over text.
For example, when communicating with customers via email or platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams, users can hover over a customer's name to get information about them and past interactions.
Now, rather than just getting a set of facts in a Hyper Card, users can interact with the card – they can ask the card a question and then ask follow-up questions to dig deeper and gain greater insight into the information.
“We've built AI into HyperIntelligence,” said Saurabh Abhyankar, chief product officer at MicroStrategy. “Not only is HyperIntelligence available instantly and contextually to the applications you use when you need it, but on top of that simple set of information, you have a full AI bot running behind the scenes.”
According to Abhyankar, one example of how companies can leverage the combination of HyperIntelligence and Auto is marketing lead generation.
By hovering over a customer's name in Salesforce and using Hyper Cards to pull information about that customer's past leads from Marketo, users can now ask which marketing campaigns those leads came from and who the primary contacts for those leads were. They can then follow up with those contacts to generate new sales relationships.
“The fundamental value proposition is time and effort savings,” Abhiyankar said, noting that the time savings could equate to thousands of dollars per user per year, “but there are other benefits to it, value creation, that are harder to quantify but can be quite significant.”
Mike Leone, an analyst in TechTarget's enterprise strategies group, said the combination of HyperIntelligence and Auto is useful because of its potential to provide insights in the context of a user's work.
“It's the delivery of contextual insights that resonates most with customers, and that's key here,” he said. “Nearly every analytics vendor offers some form of GenAI chatbot, but many lack the customization and personalization needed to quickly get to the insights that matter most to individual users.”
It's also important that insights are provided without users having to switch applications, Leone continued.
“The delivery mechanism that MicroStrategy uses to provide this is extremely valuable,” he said. “The goal here is to eliminate the multi-step back and forth that you see in many embedded chat tools and provide a shortcut to the insights people want most.”
Henschen said that while delivering AI-powered insights through Hyper Cards is beneficial to MicroStrategy customers and is a logical combination of two existing capabilities, it won't be a good fit for all MicroStrategy users.
He noted that HyperIntelligence is a browser-based hyperlink system that requires a browser plug-in. This combination allows organizations that handle sensitive information that needs to be kept secure to avoid using the feature. Additionally, while HyperIntelligence requires the setup of Hyper Cards, which is a simple, no-code process, some organizations may choose other means of delivering data to end users.
“Some of our clients are stuck with traditional dashboards, data visualizations and data stories,” Henschen says.
In addition to HyperIntelligence's AI-powered insights, the latest MicroStrategy One release includes improvements to the vendor's semantic network to help Auto better understand individual organizations, a button that lets users provide feedback on generated AI responses so Auto can learn, and improvements to core features like filtering and Microsoft Office integration.
from now on
MicroStrategy was inspired to add Auto’s generative AI capabilities to HyperIntelligence because customers asked for a blend of the two capabilities and the company recognized that users didn’t need yet another feature, Abhyankar said.
“Nobody needs another app,” he said. “Nobody needs another destination. They're already overwhelmed.”
So far, most generative AI tools are separate environments that users need to access. MicroStrategy aims to bring generative AI to the places where its customers do the majority of their work. Adding Auto capabilities to HyperIntelligence is one way to do that; the vendor's roadmap includes more ways to do it.
“Over the next 12 months, you'll see us investing heavily in the concept of giving users insights in context when they need them and then getting out of the way,” Abhyankar said. “This isn't something that users have to do.”
With regards to generative AI, automated fuel data modeling is in development, he continued. Beyond generative AI, MicroStrategy's product development plans also include improving the interoperability of MicroStrategy One with other data platforms, expanding deployment options for its cloud-based platform, and enhancing the delivery of data to frontline workers.
“We really [empowering frontline workers] “This is a real opportunity,” Abhiyankar said. “We see this as an untapped market.”
Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial and a journalist with over 25 years of experience, focusing on analysis and data management.
