Most business AI will happily answer any question you ask it. It's fluent, it's quick and it sounds certain.
The question worth asking is what it's reading.
Confident, and wrong
Point an AI assistant at raw exports from your systems and it will do its best with what it finds. The trouble is what it finds:
- The same customer three times. "ACME Ltd", "Acme Limited" and "A.C.M.E." look like three customers, so a question about your biggest customers gets the wrong answer.
- Records that shouldn't count. Cancelled orders, credited invoices and test jobs sit in the raw data alongside everything else.
- No agreed definitions. Ask about margin and the AI has to guess how you calculate it. It will guess confidently.
The answer comes back well written and plausible. Nothing in it tells you it's wrong. That's what makes it dangerous in a board pack.
The fix is underneath the AI, not in it
A better model doesn't solve this. The data it reads does.
The Vizora AI Assistant reads only the certified gold tables that Vizora Data Forge produces: the same tables your reports use. By the time data reaches gold, duplicates have been removed, the same customer has been matched across systems, and your business rules have been applied and signed off.
So when you ask "which of our top 20 customers ordered less this quarter than last?", the assistant is working from one customer list, with cancelled orders already taken out and your definition of an order already applied. It gives the same answer your reports would, because it's reading the same numbers.
Two other things matter just as much:
- It works through governed tools. The assistant doesn't wander through your systems. It uses a defined set of tools against the certified data.
- Every question is logged. You can see what was asked and what was answered.
The same numbers in your inbox
Vizora AI Alerts read the same certified tables too. You describe an alert in plain English, typed or spoken, for example: "Send the directors last week's sales and the top 10 customers every Monday at 8am." Alerts can be scheduled, or sent only when a figure crosses a threshold or moves by a set percentage. They check your figures every day, so the right person hears about it within a day, not at month end.
Because alerts, reports and the assistant all read from one place, an alert never disagrees with the dashboard it relates to.
Five questions to ask about any business AI
Whether or not you choose Vizora, these are worth asking any supplier:
- Which data does the AI read: raw system data, or a cleaned and agreed layer?
- How does it know two records are the same customer?
- Where are your business rules, such as margin or revenue recognition, defined, and who signs them off?
- Can it show where a number came from?
- Is every question and answer logged?
If the answers are vague, the AI's answers will be too.
See it on your own questions
Our free reporting health check takes 30 minutes. Bring the questions you'd most like to ask your business, and we'll tell you honestly what it would take to answer them from one certified set of numbers. You'll get a one-page summary within a day. Book your health check.