5 ms·

Show HN: nbi.ai – Generative Business Intelligence

98 points by fromthegut 3y ago

SubiculumCode 3y ago
Can you unpack: "Drive growth with AI-generated data narratives." Superficially, that sentence reads as fluff corporatespeak
- codetrotter 3y ago
  My interpretation: Use AI to understand the data, so that you can get more customers / serve your existing customers better. Disclaimer: I’ve never tried their product
  - fromthegut 3y ago
    Your interpretation is accurate! The self service connectors we build are mostly marketing/ sales data sources, so the narratives we generate are focused on growth insights and recommendations. Feel free to try: would love to hear your feedback!
    - codetrotter 3y ago
      > Feel free to try I will, but not yet. I am building a product, slowly. But my only user so far is myself :p
      - fromthegut 3y ago
        Good luck then!
- fromthegut 3y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! Historically, we've been focused on growth use cases (marketing, sales, PLG). "Data narratives" is how we call our natural language written insights (AI generated). So it might sound like a corporate jargon but actually describes our value proposition. Will think how to make it more clear. Thanks!
- lordnacho 3y ago
  I thought it was a parody website until I saw the founder commenting here.
fromthegut 3y ago
Hi HN, Yury and Michael are here to answer your questions. 2 years ago, we launched Narrative BI to make data analytics available for everyone. Since then we helped 2,500+ teams get insights from their marketing data. Our backstory is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33627953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33627953 We started as a freemium product and built a unique business data set. We used this dataset to launch NBI.AI - a Generative BI platform that can be connected to virtually any structured data source (unlike our previous version designed for specific data connectors).
blotato 3y ago
Can you share some examples of what people are using this for today?
- fromthegut 3y ago
  You can learn more about our solutions here https://www.narrative.bi/solutions https://www.narrative.bi/solutions But let me describe the most popular use cases: 1. Report automation. People connect their marketing data sources and get automated reports on key metrics 2. Anomaly detection. We generate alerts when we see unusual patterns that affect your key business metrics 3. Natural language insights: we uncover interesting patterns and correlations in your data and provide recommendations on how you can improve/optimize your campaigns
  - FiberBundle 3y ago
    Do you use that data for training? Given this: > We started as a freemium product and built a unique business data set. We used this dataset to launch NBI.AI - a Generative BI platform that can be connected to virtually any structured data source it sounds as if you have done so in the past.
    - fromthegut 3y ago
      We don't use customers' data (eg data from your data sources) for training purposes. What we use is meta-data like objectives, behavioral data, preferences and feedback loop (was it helpful y/n) to personalize the insights.
      - gremlinunderway 3y ago
        "we don't literally steal your data but we surveil you to harvest data from you like a skinner box."
        warkdarrior 3y ago
        The next logical step after ad tracking -- you will use their website and willingly give them your info for better surveillance.
vood 3y ago
Hey folks, I'm a free customer here and a big-big fan of their project. I've been using narrative.bi for my project and sharing the results on Twitter [1] lately. How I'm using narrative.bi: - A high-level report of WoW, and MoM changes on our website traffic that land in my email. - Alternative to GA4 UI, which drives me nuts. What I don't get yet and I want to see implemented (I'll definitely pay for this): - Dimensional analysis: Which dimensions contribute to the topline change the most. I.e. Say unique users increased by 30% WoW, what top 5 dimensions have contributed to this change? Country? Device? Etc - Global event correlation: are there any global events that influence the metrics change? Maybe a holiday in the Country? [1] https://twitter.com/avysotsky/status/1723403222906286185 https://twitter.com/avysotsky/status/1723403222906286185
- fromthegut 3y ago
  Hey @vood, thanks for the feedback! We actually improved our drill-downs recently. Check it out: https://www.narrative.bi/product-updates/purchase-insights-ga4 https://www.narrative.bi/product-updates/purchase-insights-g... It's totally OK to use Narrative BI in a no-UI way via email or slack, but our web UI provides more advanced insights so you may want to check it from time to time. Simply click on an insight in your email and you'll be redirected to a more detailed view.
hyuuu 3y ago
how do you ensure that the AI that you use does not hallucinate? (assuming you use some type of LLM)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- fromthegut 3y ago
  We do a lot of pre-processing and post-processing with iterative generations and a voting system to ensure accuracy. AI is mostly used for natural language generation. For insight-generation, we built our own algorithm (ML-based).
WillAdams 3y ago
When will there be an Automator-like tool which will allow a user to create basic workflows? I have a stack of several hundred invoices with checks which I take photos of and then need to rename to match the Invoice ID. If I could also have it find the check #, amoutn, and date of the check and some other information and use all that to construct a filename --- that would be ideal, but just getting the Invoice ID would be a nice start.
- kfrzcode 3y ago
  OCR. Tesseract. Huginn. Python. Mo AI needed but add a LLama and you're home rolled. N
- micrum 3y ago
  you may want to check https://www.veryfi.com/ https://www.veryfi.com/
cgio 3y ago
A pet peeve of mine, as someone who has been in the BI domain for a few years. There is no such thing as data driven decisions. What is there, is decision driven data, i.e. what you monitor indicates your desired decision making toolset. This comment is not specifically targeted against this product, as other than that marketing part the rest of claims are very expected and valid. I do have reservations about whether generative AI produces much more value in this context than older rule-based NLG approaches. I.e. I would not expect the divergence between rule-based and statistical inference narratives to be significantly different in the context of traditional BI, where data unexpectedness is hamstrung in rigid data models.
fblp 3y ago
Any plans for a shopify integration?
- fromthegut 3y ago
  Yes, we plan to add Shopify, Klaviyo and many more integrations soon!

98 points by fromthegut 3y ago

Can you unpack: "Drive growth with AI-generated data narratives." Superficially, that sentence reads as fluff corporatespeak

codetrotter 3y ago
My interpretation: Use AI to understand the data, so that you can get more customers / serve your existing customers better. Disclaimer: I’ve never tried their product
- fromthegut 3y ago
  Your interpretation is accurate! The self service connectors we build are mostly marketing/ sales data sources, so the narratives we generate are focused on growth insights and recommendations. Feel free to try: would love to hear your feedback!
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    > Feel free to try I will, but not yet. I am building a product, slowly. But my only user so far is myself :p
    - fromthegut 3y ago
      Good luck then!
fromthegut 3y ago
Thanks for the feedback! Historically, we've been focused on growth use cases (marketing, sales, PLG). "Data narratives" is how we call our natural language written insights (AI generated). So it might sound like a corporate jargon but actually describes our value proposition. Will think how to make it more clear. Thanks!
lordnacho 3y ago
I thought it was a parody website until I saw the founder commenting here.

fromthegut 3y ago

Hi HN, Yury and Michael are here to answer your questions. 2 years ago, we launched Narrative BI to make data analytics available for everyone. Since then we helped 2,500+ teams get insights from their marketing data. Our backstory is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33627953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33627953 We started as a freemium product and built a unique business data set. We used this dataset to launch NBI.AI - a Generative BI platform that can be connected to virtually any structured data source (unlike our previous version designed for specific data connectors).

blotato 3y ago

Can you share some examples of what people are using this for today?

fromthegut 3y ago
You can learn more about our solutions here https://www.narrative.bi/solutions https://www.narrative.bi/solutions But let me describe the most popular use cases: 1. Report automation. People connect their marketing data sources and get automated reports on key metrics 2. Anomaly detection. We generate alerts when we see unusual patterns that affect your key business metrics 3. Natural language insights: we uncover interesting patterns and correlations in your data and provide recommendations on how you can improve/optimize your campaigns
- FiberBundle 3y ago
  Do you use that data for training? Given this: > We started as a freemium product and built a unique business data set. We used this dataset to launch NBI.AI - a Generative BI platform that can be connected to virtually any structured data source it sounds as if you have done so in the past.
  - fromthegut 3y ago
    We don't use customers' data (eg data from your data sources) for training purposes. What we use is meta-data like objectives, behavioral data, preferences and feedback loop (was it helpful y/n) to personalize the insights.
    - gremlinunderway 3y ago
      "we don't literally steal your data but we surveil you to harvest data from you like a skinner box."
      - warkdarrior 3y ago
        The next logical step after ad tracking -- you will use their website and willingly give them your info for better surveillance.

vood 3y ago

Hey folks, I'm a free customer here and a big-big fan of their project. I've been using narrative.bi for my project and sharing the results on Twitter [1] lately. How I'm using narrative.bi: - A high-level report of WoW, and MoM changes on our website traffic that land in my email. - Alternative to GA4 UI, which drives me nuts. What I don't get yet and I want to see implemented (I'll definitely pay for this): - Dimensional analysis: Which dimensions contribute to the topline change the most. I.e. Say unique users increased by 30% WoW, what top 5 dimensions have contributed to this change? Country? Device? Etc - Global event correlation: are there any global events that influence the metrics change? Maybe a holiday in the Country? [1] https://twitter.com/avysotsky/status/1723403222906286185 https://twitter.com/avysotsky/status/1723403222906286185

fromthegut 3y ago
Hey @vood, thanks for the feedback! We actually improved our drill-downs recently. Check it out: https://www.narrative.bi/product-updates/purchase-insights-ga4 https://www.narrative.bi/product-updates/purchase-insights-g... It's totally OK to use Narrative BI in a no-UI way via email or slack, but our web UI provides more advanced insights so you may want to check it from time to time. Simply click on an insight in your email and you'll be redirected to a more detailed view.

hyuuu 3y ago

how do you ensure that the AI that you use does not hallucinate? (assuming you use some type of LLM)

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
fromthegut 3y ago
We do a lot of pre-processing and post-processing with iterative generations and a voting system to ensure accuracy. AI is mostly used for natural language generation. For insight-generation, we built our own algorithm (ML-based).

WillAdams 3y ago

When will there be an Automator-like tool which will allow a user to create basic workflows? I have a stack of several hundred invoices with checks which I take photos of and then need to rename to match the Invoice ID. If I could also have it find the check #, amoutn, and date of the check and some other information and use all that to construct a filename --- that would be ideal, but just getting the Invoice ID would be a nice start.

kfrzcode 3y ago
OCR. Tesseract. Huginn. Python. Mo AI needed but add a LLama and you're home rolled. N
micrum 3y ago
you may want to check https://www.veryfi.com/ https://www.veryfi.com/

cgio 3y ago

A pet peeve of mine, as someone who has been in the BI domain for a few years. There is no such thing as data driven decisions. What is there, is decision driven data, i.e. what you monitor indicates your desired decision making toolset. This comment is not specifically targeted against this product, as other than that marketing part the rest of claims are very expected and valid. I do have reservations about whether generative AI produces much more value in this context than older rule-based NLG approaches. I.e. I would not expect the divergence between rule-based and statistical inference narratives to be significantly different in the context of traditional BI, where data unexpectedness is hamstrung in rigid data models.

fblp 3y ago

Any plans for a shopify integration?

fromthegut 3y ago
Yes, we plan to add Shopify, Klaviyo and many more integrations soon!