TJ Tripp is ensuring that our employees are equipped to make better decisions for users

Companies have never spent more on data — but not enough employees are using that data to inform their decisions. A 2022 survey showed that across industries, only about 25% of employees actively used business intelligence tools. This rate hasn’t budged in years, even though nearly every leader today is asked to back their decisions with data.

When a leading data provider asked 552 U.S. business decision-makers what would get them to use data more frequently, 90% of leaders said they need the data to be in the apps they already use, not in separate dashboards.

Not long ago, that sentiment was true at Understood. Even though the organization had extensive user data and dashboards, accessing this data still required dashboard fluency. The time it took to access data limited innovation and decision-making.

TJ Tripp, a senior data and analytics engineer at Understood, wanted to be part of the solution. His team was exploring ways to make our existing dashboards more user-friendly. But it still meant that people had to build a custom dashboard or learn to filter data themselves — a detour from their actual jobs.

TJ and his team also tested one tool’s built-in conversational AI. But the AI-powered assistant could only search data sources that the user pointed it to first. It was unreasonable for all employees to know where specific data lived before they could even ask a data-based question.

So TJ’s team built something new: the Understood Databot, a tool employees can just talk to in Slack. Instead of learning a dashboard’s filters, employees ask a question the way they’d ask a colleague. Then the bot pulls the answer from across Understood’s data sources. The team made sure the bot understands our specific vocabulary, too — like the difference between “on-platform” and “off-platform” engagement. People don’t have to translate their question into data-speak before asking.

That on-demand access is already changing how teams work.

Designers can ask what users are actually clicking on and use it to inform site layout in real time.

Our newsroom can find out how readers are responding to an article they just published and adjust course when sharing tomorrow’s news.

Fundraising can pull the numbers they need for a grant proposal in minutes instead of days.

The change has been just as big for TJ’s extended team. Analysts now spend 78% less time answering one-off data requests. This is freeing them up to spend more time on data modeling and analysis that can shape business decisions, making them even more essential partners to the business.

With more time to focus on user behaviors, our data analysts are delivering more in-depth analysis on critical areas, like “how users browse our site.” This analysis was the catalyst for a more intuitive site navigation bar — helping our millions of Understood.org visitors more easily find the resources they need.

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