Data
Representative Image Pixabay/Tung Nguyen

Information is easy to come by these days — maybe too easy.

Type a question into a search engine and vast loads of results will appear. At the same time, people are overwhelmed daily at work with emails, documents, messages, and meetings where more information is added to the already insurmountable stack.

The dizzying result is information overload because access to information is not the same as grasping the meaning or significance of that information. While it's great that businesses can pile up mountains of data, it does little good if employees are left confused, frustrated, or mystified by the charts, graphs, spreadsheets, and reports placed before them.

Artificial intelligence can step in and bridge the gap, but not necessarily in the way many business leaders might guess. People often think of AI as a tool that helps make operations more efficient, speeding up productivity. But generative AI is also something that can make information — even columns and columns of numbers — more comprehensible, providing context and leading to better decision-making.

After all, exposing people to additional information in and of itself doesn't make them more capable. Moving forward, the organizations that succeed will be the ones that help employees understand the complexity of all the facts and data speeding in their direction so that they can make the best use of it.

The Value of Information is in Understanding It

An excellent example of how AI can assist with understanding reams of complex information is what we faced six years ago. During the pandemic, the entire world urgently needed to make sense of confusing and complicated information about COVID-19. Everyone wanted to understand what was happening so they could keep themselves and their families safe. But it was not humanly possible for the average person to analyze all the pandemic data they were inundated with.

At the time, my company Arria, saw the problem and became involved in a project to convert COVID data compiled by Johns Hopkins University into plain language people could understand, giving them up-to-date information about the virus.

The information that flows daily into businesses isn't usually about such life-and-death matters, but it is just as confounding for employees to grasp. And if they can't understand it, they can't act on it in the most optimal way. After all, the value of information is in understanding, not just in possessing it.

In fact, we aren't particularly adept at handling an avalanche of information.

Researchers studying human decisionmaking have found that many of our poor decisions are linked to the presence of too much information. The same researchers say that one successful strategy for decisionmaking is to replace intuition with formal analytic processes, taking into account all the relevant data on all the known variables.

This is no doubt true, but following that strategy can be difficult when information has reached the overload level and keeping track of all the relevant data and all the known variables becomes just as confusing.

Turning Data into Language

And that is where generative AI can enter the discussion. While the internet revolutionized access to information, generative AI is transforming how we understand, reason, and interact with knowledge itself. AI can sift through voluminous amounts of reports and data — whether that is sales numbers, marketing results, expenses, trends or something else — and provide a narrative in plain language that explains what we are looking at.

Why plain language? Don't graphs, charts, and spreadsheets do just as good a job of bringing data to us?

Maybe for some people whose brains are attuned to numbers in that way. But for many of us, the best way to understand new concepts is to have it presented through language. When we read it, we understand it. Without language, it is impossible to get real value from data, much less share it with others.

Yes, those are the numbers. But what do those numbers tell us?

With language, we can be certain that we draw the necessary insights and that we create a shared understanding with others. Language allows data to become a universal form of information delivery. It's universal because we don't have to read programming language, interpret a graph, or digest a spreadsheet.

From there, the human brain takes over, making decisions based on a much better understanding of the information.

This is why businesses will struggle if they aren't prepared to make the best use of information that's already in their possession and waiting to be examined through the right lens. Success will come from digesting that information, grasping its import and relevance, and putting what is learned into action.

About Sharon Daniels

Sharon Daniels, author of "Evolve: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Technologies to Enable Superhuman Capabilities," is the CEO of Arria NLG. Daniels has more than 30 years of experience in global strategic business development, including as the co-founder of Diligent, a company that was listed on the New Zealand Stock Exchange prior to its sale in 2016. Daniels chairs Arria's Global Advisory Council of respected leaders who bring subject matter expertise from multiple industries to influence Arria's natural language technology. She is also a member of the Forbes Technology Council and has been featured in a number of publications, including The New York Times.