Discover the data analysis AI tools that are empowering startups to streamline operations, gain deeper insights, and accelerate growth.
written by: Paige Bennett
executive editor: Ron Dawson
Discover the data analysis AI tools that are empowering startups to streamline operations, gain deeper insights, and accelerate growth.
written by: Paige Bennett
executive editor: Ron Dawson
If startups want to scale successfully, they must pay attention to their data. From understanding what customers want to pinpoint weaknesses in the business that are open to improvements, data analysis is essential to growing a startup.
According to Impact, organizations that focus on data analysis are 23 times more likely to acquire new customers and 19 times more likely to be profitable. Further, nearly 92% of companies gained value from investing in data analytics in 2023, as reported by Exploding Topics.
There is real power and value to gain from a startup’s data, but it can seem like a hassle to find the time to dive deep to analyze it all. That’s where AI can come in handy.
Startups can use AI in their data analysis to save time and glean better insights from their data. From organizing data and removing duplicates to predicting future customer behaviors and trends based on historical data from a startup itself or its industry, AI helps startups get more in-depth knowledge from their data in less time.
Here are some common ways that AI can help with startup data analysis:
Data analysis depends on clean, organized data for the most accurate results, but that can require a lot of time to identify and remove any duplicates or incomplete data and organize data in order to start analyzing it. Enter AI, which can automatically spot duplicates or missing data, flag questionable entries, and organize data based on the parameters you set.
Once it has cleaned up and organized the data, AI will then be able to process the information and provide short or detailed summaries, highlighting any interesting analyses for you to take a closer look.
According to the Vena Benchmark Report, around 73% of businesses in the study were wasting time on manual tasks like data entry and validation. In the same report, 80% of employees who used AI tools felt their productivity increased.
The increase in productivity is especially true for sales teams, with 52% of sales reps finding that AI saves them time on data analytics.
When startups consider new product launches or marketing campaigns, they may want to map trends to determine how to prepare their GTM strategy or where to reach their audience.
However, rather than sorting through all of the company’s customer data and comparing it to historical market trends, startups can use AI tools to do the manual work for them. AI can quickly identify trends based on past sales and marketing data and point out customer behaviors and movements in the market. This process allows startup leaders to quickly see predictions for their customers and market and make important business decisions, like the best time of year to launch a new product based on solid data.
One of the biggest benefits of using AI tools for startup data analysis is that you can get into the minds of your consumers by analyzing their interaction and sales history with the startup and highlighting any trends, preferences, and behaviors. From there, you can tailor your messaging to each customer.
Personalization can boost revenue and startup growth. According to McKinsey & Company, personalized marketing can increase revenue by up to 15% and reduce the cost of customer acquisition by as much as half. The firm also found that fast-growing companies make around 40% more of their revenue from personalization than companies with slower growth.
Startup leaders can tap into the benefits of personalization by using AI tools, which can work quickly to put you on the path to higher revenue and growth.
“I really like the use cases of AI that are about synthesizing content. So, taking all the customer research you've done, taking every call or sales recording that you have, transcribing it, and having AI pull out the major themes to inform product direction or how you position and talk about your product,” Meghan Keaney Anderson, head of global product marketing and communications at Watershed, told HubSpot for Startups. “That's a great use case, especially when you need to understand different segments really well, going back to that point about how it’s like, ‘Let’s use AI to create more tailored experiences for the audiences that we have.’”
Because AI can analyze and predict market trends and consumer behaviors, this technology can also flag any potential risks based on downward trends or market or behavior shifts. When AI analyzes large volumes of data, it can quickly highlight any anomalies that could become a threat.
AI will reveal these potential risks, allowing startup leaders to prepare alternate plans that allow them to pivot in case the risks come to fruition.
Not only does this help the startup avoid any negative impacts of changes in the market, but it can also let the startup get ahead of the competition in adjusting to market changes.
Startups are particularly vulnerable to competitors, especially around the three- to five-year mark, Embroker reported. By researching and understanding the competition, startups can gain an edge and stand out to potential customers. However, it takes a lot of time to perform competitive analysis, which is where AI comes into play.
AI tools will gather data and conduct research for you, collecting information on your main competitors as well as your market and industry as a whole. This information provides a comprehensive look at how you can fill a niche or solve a problem in the market that your competitors aren’t addressing.
There are many ways startups use AI for data analysis to drive growth, but how do you know which tools are worth your time and financial investments?
While there are plenty of options out there today, many startups are using some of the following tools across various categories to improve data visualization, predict trends, automate data entry and analysis, personalize marketing, and more.
Looking at massive amounts of data in spreadsheet after spreadsheet isn’t always an effective way to understand the information at hand. That’s why startups are using AI tools for data visualization, which turns even complex data sets into easy-to-understand visual elements, like charts and diagrams.
Tableau is one option that can turn data into interactive visual elements and dashboards. This tool uses AI to analyze the data and create visuals that you can click into to get deeper insights as you interact with the data.
Power BI, a Microsoft tool, is another option that can generate visual analyses and reports quickly with AI. You can use any source or multiple sources to create the data set, meaning this is a good option for analyzing trends within the startup or the market and industry at large.
When you want AI to meet specific criteria to better serve your startup’s needs, machine learning is a helpful tool. Machine learning allows the AI to continuously improve its analyses based on the parameters you set so it can adapt to your startup’s specific data. This allows startup leaders to continuously improve their data analyses without spending a lot of time programming (and reprogramming) the AI.
Google Cloud AI is a trusted machine learning platform that offers customized model-building tools and pre-trained options for teams who want to save more time. The service’s Vertex AI Platform includes a model garden with more than 150 machine learning and AI models for data analysis.
Amazon also offers a machine learning platform via the Amazon SageMaker, which gives startups access to pre-trained machine learning models or offers the option to customize larger models. This service allows you to build out the machine learning platform that suits your business, including options with no-code tools for data analysis for quick deployment and scaling.
Another helpful AI tool from Microsoft, the Azure Machine Learning, offers a secure, compliant platform that scales to handle more data as your startup grows. The machine learning features are replicable, so it’s easy to reuse your favorite tools in the platform on various data sets.
You don’t have to be a professional data scientist to understand your company’s data. Automation tools make it easy to analyze data, pull insights, and prepare predictions without extensive knowledge of data science.
Take, for instance, DataRobot, a flexible predictive AI tool that cleans and organizes data to prepare it for analysis. From there, you can use predictive models to gain insights into the data. This tool is also easy to build and scale alongside your startup and can even integrate with your team’s favorite apps, like Slack or Microsoft Teams.
Startups may also turn to H2O.ai, which is an open-source predictive AI tool. It provides a secure machine learning option that you can apply to your entire tech stack, making it more user-friendly and accessible for the entire company. This tool can even process data from documents or web pages, making it ideal for analyzing your website or competitors.
Whether you want to understand client feedback better or you’re trying to analyze for SEO, a natural language processing (NLP) tool can help derive information from words rather than just numbers. NLP tools can understand, organize, and draw insights from human language, making them especially helpful for customer insights, competitor analysis, or market research.
Medallia is a popular startup data analysis tool that can analyze and classify text and even provides sentiment analysis. That means you can collect insights from social media posts, customer reviews, top-performing blog posts, and more to understand your target audience better and inform your content and marketing decisions.
Nearly everyone these days is familiar with ChatGPT, the AI tool from OpenAI. However, OpenAI’s tools aren’t just helpful in brainstorming for content creation. The company’s NLP tools can also help analyze text and automate your customer service functions, like with a chatbot, to provide human-like assistance while saving you time to tackle more complex client concerns.
Business intelligence refers to the infrastructure a company uses to analyze data that it will use to make business decisions. BI can help a startup scale successfully by allowing it to understand its customers, market, and industry thoroughly.
Zoho Analytics is a BI tool that combines data visualization, data preparation, and predictive technology all in one helpful platform. Users can import data from multiple sources, whether they need information from spreadsheets or the cloud. From there, Zoho Analytics can clean, enhance, and organize your data to lead you to the most accurate insights, which it can present in easy-to-understand visuals like charts, maps, and pivot tables. Startups can also get more precise sales predictions with this tool.
Because customer personalization is so crucial to increasing revenue and retaining clients, startups need a reliable insights tool for analyzing customer data. The HubSpot CRM uses AI tools for a comprehensive approach to customer insights.
Not only can HubSpot analyze data and present it in clear visuals, but the AI can automatically tailor marketing materials to personalize messaging to customers based on the data analyses. HubSpot can also quickly respond to potential customer inquiries, analyze social media performance, and generate website content.
There are many ways a startup can use predictions and forecasts to scale its business. For one, predictions based on company data and market trends can help determine product improvements or launches, and forecasting can help startups know when to invest in hiring new team members or expanding to larger offices. However, startups may also need predictions to show potential investors that they are on track to increase revenue and grow the business successfully and sustainably.
Predictive analytics tools like Alteryx help provide these predictions and data insights. Alteryx is a code-free tool that makes it easy for beginners to get started in data analytics. It offers features like data cleaning and organizing, analysis, visualizations, and more while also offering machine learning and predictive analytics that can scale as your business grows.
Another popular predictive analytics tool is Altair’s RapidMiner, which combines machine learning, data mining, and predictive analytics all in one place. This easy-to-use tool can work on desktops, servers, or the cloud, so it scales with the startup. It can process and analyze real-time data and provide predictive analytics to help inform business decisions.
For startups, scaling wisely and sustainably all depends on how you handle data. If the company data just sits forgotten in spreadsheets in the cloud, you risk leaving behind valuable information that could improve the business.
Whether you want to understand which product or services your clients love most, what time of year customers are seeking out your startup’s offerings, when your sales tend to increase or decrease each month, or which content performs best, data analytics can give you insights you won’t find anywhere else.
Data analysis is a lengthy process, and time is a tight resource for most startups. Instead of trying to input and organize data manually, leave the time-consuming work to AI tools and instead focus on making the best, most data-driven decisions to propel your business forward.
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