Article by Rozmari Hadjicharalambous,  Artificial Intelligence & Data Consultant 

 

Imagine you are the CEO of a company. It’s Monday morning and today is a big day. You’re about to make a major decision—launching a brand-new product in an untapped market. The stakes are high. Get it right, and your company could capture a whole new customer base. Get it wrong, and you’ll waste months of effort, budget, and credibility.

You call a meeting with your leadership team to get the data you need.

“Marketing” is confident—their reports show demand in this new market is skyrocketing. “We’ve analysed search trends and social media conversations,” they say. “There’s a real buzz around this.”

“Sales” is sceptical. “The numbers don’t look that great,” they counter, flipping through a printed report. “In the regions we tested, conversion rates were lower than expected. We’re not sure customers are actually ready to buy.”

“Finance” jumps in. “We’re concerned about profitability. The margins in this market are tighter than we thought,” they warn. “If we go in with the wrong pricing strategy, we could lose money instead of making it.”

“Operations” throws another wrench into the discussion. “We’re already at full capacity with our current suppliers,” they say. “We’d need to rework our supply chain before we can scale production.”

Conflicting opinions are flying across the room. You take a deep breath and ask, “Okay, let’s look at the actual data. Show me the reports.”

That’s when the real chaos begins.

Your marketing team pulls out a PowerPoint with screenshots from Google and Meta. Sales emails you an Excel file full of numbers with no explanation.
Finance sends over a different Excel file—none of the figures match what sales provided. Operations digs up an old report from six months ago. “It’s not fully up to date,” they admit, “but it should give you an idea.”

You glance between mismatched spreadsheets, outdated PDFs, and data coming in from all directions. “Does anyone have a single, updated, clear report?” Silence….

By the time you try to reconcile all the numbers, you realise it’s impossible. The data isn’t just scattered—it’s contradictory, outdated, and unreliable.

You wanted to make a data-driven decision, but instead, you’re left with a data disaster. And the worst part? The clock is ticking. If you delay, your competitor—who already has a similar product in development—might launch first.

 

Now, Imagine a Different Scenario

It’s Monday morning again. The same high-stakes decision is on the table. But this time, instead of scrambling for data, you open a custom Business Intelligence dashboard in Power BI.

  • Marketing insights page is integrated with all your social media platforms, viewing your daily post activity, campaign performance in Facebook, Google, Instagram and your customers’ reactions and comments. You can now see that for similar product launches and marketing approaches in the past, there has been an overall positive sentiment by your customers.
  • Sales data smoothly integrates with your ERP and CRM systems and reveals which customer segments are most likely to convert, based on historical performance and AI-driven forecasts. You can see that periods with increased sales align with certain marketing campaigns. This gives you some insights into which steps need to be taken next.
  • Finance metrics brings real-time data from financial records and your ERP system. As you analyse the numbers, you notice something interesting: the insights from your finance dashboard perfectly align with your sales data. The customer segments most likely to convert—identified in your CRM analytics—also represent the most profitable ones according to the financial forecasts.
  • Operations dashboards track supplier capacity, logistics costs, and inventory needs in real-time. You can see clearly which of your suppliers have capacity and can easily guide your operations team on the next steps.

Everything is up-to-date, accurate, and connected in one place.  Your marketing team was confident that demand exists. Your sales team provided solid conversion predictions. And now, your finance dashboard confirms that the pricing strategy supports sustainable growth without sacrificing profitability. Instead of arguing over who has the right numbers, your team focuses on strategy - how to refine your approach, mitigate risks, and maximise success.

You look at you team and think: “Thankfully, we invested in BI a couple of months ago. The struggle was real until getting the data right, connecting it and storing it into the right place but it’s so worth it. This would have taken hours or even days…”

With BI, decision-making isn’t based on guesswork and gut feelings. It’s fast, precise, and backed by data that works for you - not against you. So, the real question isn’t whether you need Business Intelligence.

The real question is: how much longer can you afford to make decisions without it?