Those of us who make IBM Cognos Analytics know that there’s a business revolution underway — one where everything happens faster. In this setting, you have no choice but to make the right decision quickly, and then do it again — and again, and again — especially in those high-impact moments when a customer is engaged or an urgent need arises in your business.

This world moves too fast and is flooded with too much data for you to be stuck making decisions the old way. You need analytics that go further than reporting WHAT happened, helping you understand WHY it happened. That’s why our team is so dedicated to giving you analytics tools that instantly transform your data into relevant insights using augmented intelligence (AI), machine learning, pattern detection, data science and more.

In other words, that’s why we built IBM Cognos Analytics 11.1.

Bringing the power of AI to BI

In the previous version of Cognos Analytics, we had already worked from extensive user feedback and our team’s own creativity to deliver beautiful visualizations, drag-and-drop formatting, dashboard drill-downs and many other features, all on our trusted, governed platform.

This new release, which is a huge advance in our quest to bring the full power of AI to business intelligence (BI), builds on that work but goes beyond it with new capabilities like: an AI conversational assistant, advanced analytics, AI-recommended visualizations and insights and user-centric data prep and modeling.

Thanks to many months of hard work, countless conversations with our users and lots of field testing, Cognos Analytics 11.1 is easy to use even for beginners, yet powerful enough for the most demanding data explorer. Even better, it’s built to fit virtually any budget.

For more specifics on the product and what it’s meant to achieve, check out this announcement post by Greg Adams, VP of IBM Business Analytics. You may be particularly interested in some of the features he calls out, including:

• Storytelling
• Smart exploration
• Automated visualizations
• Reusable content
• Advanced analytics

All of these make it much simpler and easier for anyone in your organization, whether or not they have a technical background in data analysis, to capture the compelling stories about your customers and operations that lie hidden in your data. Those are the insights that lead to better decisions and more successful business outcomes.

The next wave of business intelligence

Cognos Analytics 11.1 gives every user — whether data scientist, business analyst or non-specialist — more power to perform relevant analysis in a way that ties back to organizational objectives. It shortens each user’s journey from simple to sophisticated analytics, allowing them to harness data to explore the unknown, identify new relationships, get a deeper understanding of outcomes and challenge the status quo.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be publishing more posts here that go into detail on specific topics like automated data prep, using live data sources, pattern detection and report authoring. Meanwhile, you can take a deeper dive into the new Cognos Analytics — complete with videos — in our new SmartPaper, “The next wave of business intelligence”.

Finally, on October 3rd at 9:00 AM Eastern, we’ll be formally launching the new version to the audience at IBM Analytics University in Miami. But you don’t have to be there to take part, because we’re also hosting a livestream broadcast you can view from wherever you are. Sign up for the livestream by following this link.

However you choose to do it, I hope you’ll take the time to see for yourself why our team is so proud of what we’ve done with Cognos Analytics 11.1 — and why it’s changing the face of BI.

Related post: New Cognos Analytics deployment options coming soon

Kevin McFaul is a Senior Product Manager, IBM Business Analytics.