One of the single biggest contributions of COVID-19 to businesses world-wide and society as a whole is that it has made everyone a data analyst and hungry for more insights. /thread

All of us are literally waking up to dashboards, whether they are about the spread of a virus or other economic derivatives of that.

One would think that analytics professionals world-wide are busier than ever before. /2

However, there are 2 kinds of businesses today.

1. Those who have invested in their data foundation, strategy, and are able to very quickly slice and dice data.

2. Those that are struggling to get any insight because they have not invested in their data strategy. /3

While the first category is able to project 50 different scenarios for tomorrow.

The 2nd category is still making decisions on gut feel, these are most likely to come out slower when this pandemic ends. /4

Another big factor is that all kinds of models from demand forecasting models, customer sentiment models, fraud models, churn models that were relevant 2 months ago have become irrelevant.

Businesses are constantly searching for the new baseline. /5

As the world is changing every hour, in order to predict the immediate future, analytics leaders need abilities to capture and monitor newer data and continuously improve the models.

They need a new way to combine “Humans + Data + Models” for effective decision making. /6

This is where a new technology like Explainable AI can help:

With Explainable AI, business and analytics leaders can not only make accurate decisions but also know the “why” behind the model decisions and how the various factors are influencing model outputs. /7

For example, every business out there is interested in modeling their Customer Churn and figuring out actionable insights to reduce churn.

Fine-grained insights that pinpoint to Churn reasons could help an account manager to offer personalized discounts, or upsell features. /8

Emergency departments in hospitals are asking for readmission risk models that not only help them assess the risk of having the patient come back to the ER but also know the "why" behind the risks.

Knowing the why helps the ER team take appropriate actions on the patient. /9

CFOs are asking for forecasting models that not only help them model various scenarios of economic recovery as lockdowns open up but also help them understand the "why" behind model forecasts. /10

Every time humanity faced adversity, we saw emergence of a new technology that changed the world forever. Eg., World-War II led to the advancement of communication and computing.

COVID-19 is enabling the adoption of digitization, analytics, AI at an unprecedented rate. /end