Derrick has nicely summarized what we do. We “reduce the need for humans to conjure up the right questions…” so they can dedicate less effort towards finding business drivers and more towards leveraging them.

Manual exploration is the weak link that slows speed-to-insight and risks overlooking key insights. Lucid shifts the analyst from the middle of the analysis loop to the end. As long as the analyst is in the middle, even when the individual query is instantaneous, the speed of getting to insights is limited by human speed. In an hour, a human can only find dozens of patterns out of millions of places to look. In minutes, Lucid examines them all.

Although the company says it’s not a machine learning company, this is the same premise used by those using ML to build models that into account take lots of variables. The ML algorithms first to the grunt work of finding patterns, then humans come in and drill down, prune or tweak the models, etc.

We’re going to see more products like Lucid on the market soon, by the way, so we’ll see how good they are in mass usage and how they really do affect job descriptions, insight discovery, etc.

First, it is unlikely that companies will entirely wipe out their analytic or IT departments and replace them with Lucid. As BI User points out, the more likely scenario is that Lucid will allow company analysts to work more efficiently toward applying the analyzed data. Thus, although the “story telling” aspect of the delivery is still important, it will not be the life or death of the product because there will probably be an actual human presenting the data to the decision makers of the company.

Second, the downslump in the economy right now will work to BeyondCore’s advantage. If there were ever a time when companies might be willing to take a chance on a computerized model that would help them cut costs on human labor, now is that time. They will likely make the choice on whether to adopt Lucid by looking at the benefits it delivers and the costs it could save; this choice would not likely be changed just because the data could potentially be delivered with a softer, more human flare.