“We Agree That Cloud Services Will Be Essential For the Majority of Data and Analytics Innovation.”
Hi, Ashley. Please tell us about your role and the team / technology you handle at Sisense. How did you arrive at Sisense?
I am the Chief Product Officer and Chief Marketing Officer at Sisense where I lead the product and go-to-market strategy, brand awareness and revenue growth. Earlier in my career, I was a software engineer at NASA and Oracle. However, I quickly realized I am better suited talking with people rather than computers, so I moved across into a product-focused role with Amazon.
What impacted me the most at Amazon was the focus on the customer, and using data to drive the business. This built a solid foundation for me to use analytics to drive better outcomes, especially as an emerging product leader. I still use this foundation throughout my career.
Next, I moved to Tableau because I had the knowledge of how analytics can be utilized to save time and money for companies. I was fortunate to be a part of the early cloud movement, and led the move of Tableau to the cloud (Tableau Online) which was a pivotal part of my career journey.
Yet, I knew there was more to analytics than descriptive analytics, so I joined Alteryx to usher in the next era towards data science with predictive and prescriptive modeling within their platform.
I’m now excited to be part of Sisense because we’re on the cusp of entering a new generation of cloud analytics that blends descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics together in a unique way. The Sisense AI-driven analytics platform goes beyond the dashboard to infuse analytics everywhere. We empower people with actionable intelligence to drive better outcomes – that’s at the core of everything we do.
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Tell us how the current BI BA industry is different today compared to what it was when you first started here.
I’ve been with Sisense for just over a year now, but the BI and analytics market has really evolved over my career journey via three distinct generations. First it started with “Gen One” which revolved around on-premises data and IT driven projects that centered around building reports for end users. Next came “Gen Two” which enabled analysts to build dashboards to understand data more deeply, without relying on IT.
But Gen two still didn’t solve the analytics adoption problem for the business users. Dashboards can be intimidating and people without “analyst” in their title are very unlikely to change their workflow to go find the data, and then spend time trying to interpret it. Sisense is solving that challenge as part of “Gen Three” analytics.
Here at Sisense, we believe the future of analytics is moving beyond the dashboard to provide actionable intelligence to everyone, regardless of title or skillset. We believe it’s about providing a flexible, customizable and extensible platform to build the solutions they need to make analytics more approachable and enable faster, better decisions at the right time, everytime.
How has your role evolved through the pandemic crisis? How did you stay on top of your game?
I started at Sisense right as lockdowns began last year, so I immediately had to adapt and rethink our approach to marketing. Customers spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to keep their ‘lights on’, as in-person events ended.
We knew we had to lead with empathetic marketing, and put ourselves in our customers shoes to help them figure out how to keep their business running. Deals mattered less, and seeing our valued customers keep going was of the most importance. We tapped into one of our values at Sisense: to be customer-centric – and pledged to help those impacted by the pandemic.
As the economic implications of the global pandemic took shape, Sisense chose to focus on customers in need, and launched a COVID-19 relief package to all 2,000+ of our customers. We offered free software and services to customers (and really to anyone in the global community) engaged in the battle to combat coronavirus.
To date, Sisense has helped hundreds of customers directly affected by the crisis. We’ve supported our healthcare customers to improve the patient experience with effective new messaging providers can now use. We’ve helped restaurants keep their doors open with the use of data analytics as they pivoted from on premise dining to online delivery systems.
In addition, in the past year, we offered our technology, services, time and resources– at n****** – to organizations that either fight COVID-19 or strive to drive change for diversity and the social unrest we had during the pandemic.
With this attention to what’s going on outside of work, and opening up spaces for employees to feel heard and seen, helps not only our executive leaders stay on top of their game, but helps Sisense as a whole to push forward through the most difficult of times.
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One lesson you learned by working with technology and people during the pandemic?
Sisense saw early on the trend and benefit of the cloud and built a cloud-native architecture to provide customers scale and flexibility to deliver on premise, cloud or hybrid options.
Early on in the pandemic, we quickly saw the need for businesses to become digitally resilient and we saw a major acceleration to the cloud. IDC predicts that 80% of enterprises will speed up their shift to a cloud-centric infrastructure.
To help customers manage their expanding cloud environments, we are extending solutions that help customers leverage cloud analytics to create new innovations, new revenue and gain a competitive edge.
Tell us more about your recent partnerships and how these alliances improve customer experience across industries?
At Sisense, we take a partner approach to ensure our customers are successful. We partner with recognizable data cloud companies like Snowflake and AWS to take out customer experience to the next level and set the standard for turning data into actionable insights.
With our cloud native architecture, Sisense is one of the only cloud agnostic and cross-cloud capable analytics vendors on the market. We have deep partnerships with AWS, Snowflake, Google (GCP) and Microsoft, along with strong cross-cloud analytics orchestration. We can provide limitless scale, cloud or hybrid approaches to the customers we have. We agree with Gartner in the sense that cloud services will be essential for the majority of data and analytics innovation (currently at 90 percent).
Air Canada is using Sisense to improve passenger safety. How do you think AI and Data Analytics could completely transform air passenger experience in the coming months? How would the post-pandemic world look like for the air travel industry when (if) things become normal?
Infusing analytics everywhere is now an imperative for the aerospace industry to proactively monitor, experiment and discover new trends so they can respond to crises, innovate and rebuild. Consumers are even more digitally connected directly to airline brands throughout their travel journey’s today, and it is paramount for airlines to get in front of everyone– from the airport to the cockpit.
Providing more personalized analytics and insights, in context to where people are spending their time, helps users understand exactly what they need to know to act on that opportunity, and how to take the next best step.
For example, with our customer Air Canada, the airline is making sure their crew on the ground knows when to change an airplane part before it even fails. Airlines can transform their business, like Air Canada, with these types of customized, AI-driven analytics to discover new revenue, implement smart maintenance and baggage management, and ultimately increase customer satisfaction.
Regardless of the industry, the customer experience can be greatly improved across any business with the use of AI-powered analytics that truly brings insights to where people are on the go.
If you think about how humans consume information today, we all receive in-context alerts in our Gmail inboxes. When a Gmail user sends an email for example, and then three days later, after no response gets an alert that says, “hello, this person hasn’t responded, would you like to follow up?” This is an example of being told the right information I need, right where I’m spending my time, so I can act on it.
Another example is Netflix. As you watch more content, Netflix will start to personalize your content journey, and give you better recommendations as to what you should watch next. This ultimately results in a better customer experience– because insights are in-context and personalized to each individual user.
Business analytics industry is heavily affected by current security and IT threats. What business strategy could be useful to thwart security risks in the industry? How do you work with your CIO and CISO in this area of operation?
There’s no question that the business analytics industry has been affected by security and IT threats. Many companies, like Sisense, have had to engage in new strategies and evolve in this past year, as cyber attacks and the nuances of a remote workforce increased.
At Sisense, we believe it is always important to engage with the security team and we have a standard focus, as well as cultural relationships in place, to integrate security throughout technology, business relationships and third parties. We believe creating a security task force and increasing employee education is even more important today. By design, our employees at Sisense partner and collaborate with our security team on key decisions.
How would you define ‘responsible AI’ in the pandemic era through the lens of a general customer?
The pandemic has had a significant effect on a wide range of consumer and business behaviors that quickly outdated how businesses interacted with their customers. As more and more interactions are digital, unethical use of personal or sensitive data can undermine trust with a vendor.
At the same time, many companies have proven AI-driven analytics to be a powerful resource to help solve many challenges in business, healthcare (like to manage covid and prevent diseases), safety, security and welfare. Customers need to be more aware of how they interact with companies online.
The major concern is making sure we are all following ethical and responsible AI practices. This is broad and ever evolving as AI continues to expand and become part of our daily lives. We’ve seen examples in the past few years where AI has gone rogue or highlights biases we may not be able to fix overnight.
We also want to be careful not to remove human intuition and creativity from too many places; we shouldn’t underestimate the power of the human brain– that can never be replaced by AI. Not everything that can be replaced with AI should be, so we need to ensure there is a responsible balance, because there will always be a need for human intuition and human connection.
Finally, we must remember that AI is far from being perfect, so we must still have humans overseeing and monitoring it, as well as validating and keeping it in check for safer outcomes.
Thank you, Sisense! That was fun and we hope to see you back on itechnologyseries.com soon.
[To participate in our interview series, please write to us at sghosh@martechseries.com]
