ThoughtSpot has expanded its Spotter conversational assistant with reasoning skills. In addition to executing queries, the assistant can brainstorm and make recommendations.
The core of the update is the new ‘change analysis’ function. Spotter now also explains why certain trends occur. “I don’t think anybody wakes up in the morning and says they’re excited about building a dashboard,” says CEO Ketan Karkhanis. “Some of our customers have more than a hundred thousand dashboards that have accumulated over the years. We feel this is the new way of consuming analytics.”
Users can ask questions such as “Why did sales drop from the third to the fourth quarter?” and then receive the figures and an analysis of the underlying causes. For new sales managers, for example, the tool can advise which products they should focus on.
Training via coaching
Spotter is trained using a process called ‘coaching’. Users ask questions and give feedback, after which the assistant learns and expands his capabilities. According to ThoughtSpot, training Spotter on about 10 percent of the possible questions is enough to answer 90 percent of the other questions.
An important new function is the possibility to integrate Spotter into Salesforce and ServiceNow. This means you do not have to leave these software environments.
Tip: Ambidextrous analytics: Ad hoc or advanced, ThoughtSpot Analyst Studio