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MicroStrategy adds personalization to GenAI-powered bot

The longtime independent analytics vendor's latest update aims to provide users with a more tailored query and response experience to reach more contextually relevant responses.

The new MicroStrategy platform update targets generative AI-powered personalization, enabling users to provide feedback to receive tailored outputs from the vendor's conversational interface.

MicroStrategy first launched Auto, a generative AI-powered assistant that enables users to query and analyze data using free-form natural language, in October 2023. Since then, the vendor has updated Auto numerous times, including making it embeddable and adding an explainability feature to instill trust in responses.

With the launch of the latest version of MicroStrategy One on Jan. 30, MicroStrategy is prioritizing personalization.

Personalization simply makes products easier to use, according to David Menninger, an analyst at ISG's Ventana Research. As a result, personalization is significant.

Information about your department, your usage habits and patterns, your most recent activity can all be used to tailor the experience so you don't have to work as hard to get to where you need to be in the product.
David MenningerAnalyst, ISG's Ventana Research

"Information about your department, your usage habits and patterns, your most recent activity can all be used to tailor the experience so you don't have to work as hard to get to where you need to be in the product," he said.

However, adding personalization capabilities to Auto doesn't represent fundamental change, such as the initial development of a natural language interface for analytics, Menninger continued. Instead, while helpful, it represents incremental improvement.

"This is more of a refinement," Menninger said. "But as people use chat interfaces more, they will come to expect them to be better and better. This will help meet some of those expectations."

Based in Tysons Corner, Va., MicroStrategy is a longtime analytics vendor that, like many of its competitors, has prioritized developing generative AI capabilities over the past two years. In its October 2024 platform update, the vendor targeted AI accuracy by upgrading the large language model (LLM) underpinning Auto to OpenAI's GPT-4o.

New capabilities

Organizations can make employees smarter and more efficient by combining generative AI models with proprietary data. As a result, the investments enterprises are making in AI development have surged since OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT marked significant improvement in LLM capabilities.

Analytics vendors have responded by developing AI-powered assistants and agents that customers can easily use with their proprietary data.

MicroStrategy was among the first to make an AI-powered assistant generally available when it launched Auto. Now, however, such capabilities are common, and vendors are no longer developing their initial AI-powered tools, but instead improving and expanding their AI offerings.

MicroStrategy's latest update aims to improve Auto with personalization.

By providing direct feedback, individual users can teach Auto to understand their queries better so that the bot can deliver more relevant responses. In addition, Auto learns by observing user behavior such as the follow-up questions they ask, and system administrators can tailor the tool to meet the needs of individual users, according to PeggySue Werthessen, MicroStrategy's vice president of go-to-market strategy.

"The more time we spend with a bot, the more it understands us," she said. "It is really the same as any co-worker. The longer we work with someone, the ... more likely we are to catch subtle differences in meaning."

Because tools such as Auto potentially broaden the use of analytics to let nontechnical workers ask questions of data, catching subtle differences in meaning is an important way of making sure such users get value from generative AI, Werthessen continued.

"Data analysts are accustomed to writing in a codelike way, but end users don't think that way," she said. "They ask questions in the way that a human would, full of shorthand and in context with a threaded conversation."

Generative AI benefits for businesses.

Mike Leone, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, now part of Omdia, also noted that personalization is valuable, reducing friction and adding contextual awareness that leads to greater efficiency. As a result, adding personalization to Auto is significant for its users.

"The bot can learn user preferences, understand context and refine responses based on past interactions," Leone said. "Without personalization, users get a generic, one-size-fits-all approach that often requires more effort to get to the right answer."

With personalization, Auto essentially becomes more effective over time rather than remaining static, which leads to increased use, he continued.

"It's a great example of personalized reinforcement learning," Leone said. "The last thing a user wants to do is constantly have back-and-forths with a bot to get the right response or insight."

Meanwhile, by updating Auto to add new capabilities that now include personalization, MicroStrategy is providing generative AI features to customers that keep it competitive with its peers, Leone continued.

"While many players in this space are simply focused on getting the right integrations to offer up basic agentic capabilities, it's refreshing to see MicroStrategy diving deeper on the personalization side," he said.

Menninger similarly said personalization might help set MicroStrategy apart from competitors such as Qlik and Microsoft Power BI, at least until they also add personalization capabilities. However, if personalizing Auto for each individual user becomes onerous for administrators, the feature could be more burden than benefit, he cautioned.

Next steps

With personalization now part of Auto, AI will continue to be a focal point for MicroStrategy as it plans product development.

The vendor has gained significant knowledge since developing its first generative AI capabilities, according to Werthessen. Using that knowledge, MicroStrategy is building a new architecture for its AI tools that will handle more complex data, including real-time data, and enable users to ask deeper questions.

"We will continue to invest heavily in our ability to support quantitative AI that serves frontline knowledge workers," Werthessen said.

In addition, MicroStrategy plans to make its semantic network more open by allowing users of external platforms -- including competitors -- to use it the same way MicroStrategy users can, she continued.

Menninger, meanwhile, suggested that MicroStrategy venture into agentic AI. Assistants such as Auto can answer questions that lead to insights, while agents can act autonomously to make suggestions and take certain actions.

Tableau is one competitor making a push toward agent-driven analytics. ThoughtSpot is another.

"Agentic AI is really the new frontier," Menninger said. "Across the industry, we need to get beyond just providing insights. We need to help people get their jobs done."

Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget and a journalist with more than 25 years of experience. He covers analytics and data management.

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