Why connected AI is essential for optimized decision-making

The AI hype cycle is still going strong. This likely isn’t the first blog you’ve read on AI, and it certainly won’t be the last. Every tech vendor is eager to tell you how their AI product roadmap will change the way you do business forever. But when you dig in with practical questions about functionality and current capabilities, their pitch may get a little hazy, leaving you wondering which AI tools exist that can help you solve your real business problems — right now.

This is because too much of the available AI on the market is still in an immature state of development. Yes, some of the output is impressive, but can it be trusted to provide accurate insights? Too often we see AI generate information that is not entirely factual or comprehensive. Results may be fast, and require less resources to produce, but if we can’t count on the quality of our AI insights, then they’re of no use in enabling us to make smarter decisions with confidence. 

Aside from needing data-driven intelligence you can trust out of AI, of equal importance is the alignment of data sources across your organization. Unfortunately, most AI solutions today aren’t being developed to integrate data between your lines of business. Disconnected AI business solutions will only result in siloed conclusions that may be misleading or even downright wrong.

In a previous blog, we shared how the context-aware, cloud-native AI of Anaplan Intelligence accelerates scenario planning and analysis. In this post, we’ll go further to explore how Anaplan Intelligence provides accurate and connected insights to drive truly optimized decisions.

Unlocking smarter decisions

The correlation between accurate insights and optimized decision-making is obvious, but the impact organizational connectedness can have on enhancing decision performance shouldn’t be underestimated. Through our intensive research, we sought to quantify the value of building connections and collaboration across organizational silos, and we found that seamless integration has a measurable impact on eliminating inefficiencies, enhancing resource allocation, and improving decision excellence.

The Anaplan Enterprise Decision Excellence Report™ sheds light on the critical interplay between decision-making, connected enterprises, and financial performance. For the first time, our research provides compelling evidence that “enterprise connectedness” is fundamental to enhanced decision-making, and that improving decision excellence leads directly to increased financial returns, including total shareholder return (TSR) by up to 14%.

Now, as AI evolves from nice-to-have features into the dominant user experience of the modern tech stack, we believe it is critical that business leaders seek AI solutions that foster real connection rather than create even more siloed information.

Fostering connected intelligence

AI is here to stay, and organizations that don’t adapt will quickly be outpaced by those that do. As we’ve illustrated, to achieve decision excellence today, businesses must implement a connected AI platform that can solve their challenges across all lines of business. 

There are many function-specific AI solutions available in the market. But these point solutions only provide single-domain AI. For instance, you can ask sales questions of your AI sales tool, or get finance insights out of your AI fintech, but you will quickly hit a roadblock if you have queries that require data input from other lines of business. 

With Anaplan Intelligence, users get one connected, AI-infused platform — from finance to supply chain and sales to workforce planning — granting your entire business a single source of truth. Our generative AI enables you to ask multi-clause questions (What? Why? What if?) and have robust conversations with your data across your range of business functions and use cases. As a result, best-fit analysis, early warnings, and actionable insights pinpoint where to make improvements that reduce operational costs, driving breakthrough efficiencies across your business.

Looking beyond AI hype

The AI you adopt must be able to seamlessly activate all your siloed data to provide real value. With AI that removes organizational barriers, it becomes possible to see the effect every decision will have across your business. And having one place to store all this information makes it easier for AI to generate precise, relevant, and valuable insights for your planning.

While others talk about the promise of AI, Anaplan delivers. Anaplan Intelligence is based on years of experience developing and deploying over a million scenario-planning models. With AI infused seamlessly across every aspect of our platform, we are uniquely able to drive successful outcomes for businesses worldwide with context-aware AI that is:

• Connected across all your business domains

• Trusted to provide precise insights and keep your data secure 

• Valuable in the business-relevant benefits it provides 

Anaplan Intelligence offers immediate, tangible, and proven value across the entire planning process. Moving beyond surface-level, disconnected, and overhyped approaches, Anaplan solutions empower the management of massive, highly dimensional, and granular datasets, laying the foundation for AI with precision and reliability. Through our holistic, long-term approach, we consistently deliver practical and scalable benefits, helping organizations thrive.