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INSIGHTS
8 min read
Published on 06/12/2024
Last updated on 06/18/2024
Predictive analytics AI: Understanding risks and implementing strategies for success
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Predictive analytics is a valuable tool for any enterprise, using current and historical business data to anticipate future outcomes. When combined with artificial intelligence (AI) tools and massive quantities of operational, customer, and market data, it’s empowering businesses to make smarter decisions at scale.
However, adopting AI as part of a business intelligence strategy presents new risks and ethical challenges that your organization must be prepared to mitigate.
AI is transforming how enterprises approach predictive analytics
Traditionally, predictive analytics processes involve time-consuming manual analysis. Data sources are often siloed, so analysis can overlook key information. AI improves this approach by automating analysis and enabling you to interact with and report on the data in new ways. For example, tools like large language models (LLMs) generate text responses to user prompts. Trained on vast datasets, LLMs can be fine-tuned with an enterprise’s proprietary data, allowing businesses to gather insights across a range of data types and sources, including text, image, and video content.
Because AI can analyze data at a massive scale, it helps users identify trends and patterns to supplement human analysis. AI pattern recognition plays a crucial role in this process, enhancing the ability to detect subtle patterns and insights that might otherwise be missed.
Examples of industry applications of AI-infused predictive analytics include:
- Customer experience. Users can prompt LLMs to analyze historical customer behavior data to create more personalized services, marketing campaigns, or sales strategies to drive conversions.
- Demand forecasting. By combining customer behavior insights with external market data, organizations can manage inventory and supply chains more effectively to avoid disruptions and optimize resources.
- Product development. Demand forecasts and customer behavior analysis can also empower organizations to approach the development of products and services more strategically.
- Risk mitigation. AI-powered predictive analytics can anticipate anomalies or threats at scale in areas like cybersecurity, finance, or insurance.
Fine-tuning strategies can enhance the precision of AI-based forecasting by keeping models continually updated and tailored for specialized use cases. Predictive analysis and machine learning play a crucial role in this process, enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of data-driven insights.
Additionally, AI models can automate tasks like data cleansing or creating predictive reports. This allows employees to redirect their efforts toward strategic planning and higher-value work, such as finding new revenue streams or implementing safeguards to mitigate security risks.
Predictive analytics AI deployment risks
Despite the benefits of deploying AI in this business function, the technology also introduces challenges around analytics reliability, security, and ethics.
Data security and privacy
AI models are trained on large datasets that often contain sensitive or proprietary information. This makes them appealing targets for attackers, who may leverage techniques like prompt injection to leak data.
Layering cloud providers for predictive analytics AI can also introduce vulnerabilities, especially if vendors do not have the security infrastructure to protect custom features in your analytics tools.
Bias
Because humans create and curate training data, it will always contain a degree of bias that is reflected in model outputs. AI models have the potential to scale these biases, which can skew predictive analytics and impact users and communities downstream. For example, AI-based medical forecasting has shown bias toward Black patients, potentially depriving them of healthcare resources.
Overfitting and outdated predictions
Overfitting occurs when a model cannot generalize the knowledge gathered during training. In other words, it can make predictions based on its training data but underperforms when responding to new datasets. Overfitting often happens when training data is insufficient in quality or quantity. This can also cause hallucinations or weak reasoning in model outputs, providing incorrect or irrelevant analytics that lead to poor business decisions.
Additionally, developers must continuously fine-tune a model to ensure that predictive analytics AI is based on current information—a costly and resource-intensive process. While models can generalize their knowledge with sufficient training data, they do not automatically stay updated without retraining on current information.
Lack of transparency
“Black box” models lack transparency in their internal processes and algorithms, making it hard to decipher how certain data is used or how a model generates predictions.
Businesses using these models may struggle to comply with data privacy standards or laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which require companies to state how their models use personal data. Customers or users may also need to know how predictions are made—for instance, in the insurance or healthcare industries. According to Cisco’s AI Readiness Index, model transparency varies between sectors and is an issue in industries like restaurant and travel services. These sectors report minimal insight into how their AI mechanisms make decisions.
Strategies and considerations for AI transformation
Addressing these risks will help you get the most out of your predictive analytics transformation and maintain a responsible AI culture that is compliant with industry standards and regulations. Strategies like adopting an AI ethical framework and using model transparency techniques can help organizations successfully navigate predictive analytics with AI. Adapt these best practices as needed to fit your requirements, values, and available resources.
Implementing robust security
Organizations must establish security infrastructure that keeps model training data safe from adversaries. While security techniques surrounding AI models continue to evolve, some baseline best practices include:
- Data anonymization. Companies should work toward anonymizing sensitive training data using techniques like data masking, which helps safeguard personally identifiable information or trade secrets from exposure.
- Encryption. Even if an attacker gains access to private data using a technique like prompt injection, encryption ensures that this information remains hidden. Companies using cloud providers as part of their predictive analytics AI should verify that encryption is a supported feature.
- Access control. Stringent controls can prevent unauthorized personnel from viewing predictive analytics generated by AI. Advanced permission management features allow you to fine-tune access for individual users or teams.
Mitigating bias through an AI ethical framework
Addressing bias in AI forecasting is crucial for businesses committed to fostering responsible AI. While it’s unrealistic to eliminate bias, organizations can tackle this issue by developing an ethical AI framework. Such a framework underpins model development and usage, ensuring alignment with enterprise values. It is comprised of a set of processes and guidelines for building, deploying, and maintaining models aligned with enterprise values.
Organizations can also create policies to improve team diversity—for instance, in development teams responsible for building AI models. However, because diversity is both difficult to achieve in this field, and complex and subjective, it’s equally important to educate employees on diversity best practices and have strategies to measure bias in AI models. This approach fosters more varied perspectives and greater bias awareness within AI development. It’s an effective way to reduce bias in model outputs and continuously identify areas for improvement.
Ensuring reliability and relevance of AI in predictive analytics
Challenges like overfitting or outdated training data can be addressed by combining responsible data management and routine audits. AI forecasting will be more reliable if training data is complete, relevant, consistent, and accurate.
Consider using data lake or data mesh techniques to prepare high-quality data for AI applications.
Ensure that training data is commensurate in complexity and scope to your use case, which will help mitigate overfitting. Solutions like RAG and advanced prompting techniques can also improve model performance and keep AI-generated analytics up-to-date. Before deploying your model, validate the quality of its outputs. Perform routine audits to evaluate the model’s relevance, accuracy, and trustworthiness over time.
Improving model transparency
Researchers are developing strategies like explainable AI (XAI) to improve model transparency, making its decision-making processes, data, and algorithms easier to track. For example, XAI techniques can visualize model logic or generate natural language responses that explain how the model arrived at a certain output.
The benefits of this technology are two-fold. First, your organization can use predictive analytics AI while staying compliant with industry regulations, such as those requiring data traceability in AI models.
Second, improving the transparency of your model can help development teams identify and fix flaws in a model’s reasoning, helping generate more reliable and accurate predictive analytics. To foster trust in AI, document these processes in detail for users and stakeholders to reference.
Enhance your predictive analytics without jeopardizing trust
If you’re considering AI as part of your business’s predictive analytics function, you may be concerned about the integrity of your data and the reliability of AI models. These issues can be addressed through responsible AI practices such as implementing security controls or using techniques like RAG to maintain accurate and timely outputs. Establishing an ethical AI framework is also valuable for governing your approach to common challenges, particularly model bias.
While the goal is to optimize your predictive analytics capabilities, these strategies will also help you comply with regulations and establish a trustworthy culture around AI. This will be a key competitive differentiator as more companies embrace this rapidly evolving technology.
Learn more about how Outshift can help you navigate the complex landscape of AI transformation.
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