A new MIT Technology Review Insights report finds that analytics agents often produce weak business insights. According to the report, 48% of insights generated by analytics agents at the surveyed companies lead to actions that improve the business. That figure is up from 37% one year earlier, but it still means more than half of agent insights are not helping.
The report says a small group of organizations it calls "insight leaders" perform better. In that group, more than 70% of agent insights lead to business-improving actions. These companies also rate their agents' insights more highly than the overall respondents do, and the gap is widest for prescriptive insights, the recommendations that drive actions.
The main cause of substandard insights, cited by 55% of surveyed executives, is a lack of business context. Fragmented or inaccessible data is the other major factor, cited by 45%. Fewer insight leaders say their agents struggle with access to context.
The report also identifies insight overload. At 52% of surveyed organizations, agents generate too many insights to evaluate properly. Only 24% can evaluate all agent insights. Most evaluate them case by case, a process the report describes as human-intensive.
To improve results, surveyed companies are prioritizing stronger AI and data governance (60%) and adding a semant