Reading Time: 3 minutesIntroduction
The ability to swiftly derive insights from data is no longer just an advantage; it’s rather a necessity. And that’s where the Fosfor Decision Cloud (FDC) comes into the picture–with its comprehensive data-to-decision suite of solutions, it streamlines and simplifies the journey from data integration to insightful decisions.
What is the Fosfor Decision Cloud?
If you are not familiar with the FDC yet, here’s a quick look:
The Fosfor Decision Cloud is a connected fabric that unifies and amplifies the value promised by the modern data ecosystem, which is made up of infrastructure, data, and application clouds. Fosfor enables organizations to effectively curate data, generate impactful insights, and formulate effective decisions to deliver the long-sought promise of data and AI: optimal business outcomes.
The FDC consists of three modules: the Data Designer, which helps users build trustworthy data transformation pipelines; the Insight Designer, which helps accelerate and automate AI/ML lifecycles; and the Decision Designer, which empowers business users with AI for better decision-making capabilities.
Enabling easier decision making
The Decision Designer provides users with an “ask bar” where they can pose natural language questions about their data. Users can delve into queries such as what happened, why it happened, what will happen, and what else one should know about.
For example, in the e-commerce domain context, a sales category manager can ask, “What are my total sales for electronics in Australia in 2023 Q4?;” or in a manufacturing context, a production manager can ask “Why did the production volume of batteries drop in Wisconsin plants in March 2024?;” Or a senior human resource executive can ask, “What will be the attrition rate in North America for associates P4 and above?”
The Fosfor Decision Cloud understands the question, searches the underlying Snowflake Data Cloud for the matching data, analyzes results, and presents beautiful charts and narrations to not only answer the question, but provide predictions and suggestions that assist in making quicker and yet more robust decisions.
While this is such a powerful tool for non-technical business users, we almost always noticed an initial reluctance for even them to get started. With the concept of AI prompting fairly new, it takes more than a few walk-throughs / demos before users can get a grasp on what and how to prompt. This has prevented users from optimally engaging the Fosfor Decision Cloud and reaping the benefits that come with using the tool. But, with the latest version release, we have addressed exactly this challenge.
Enter the Guided Ask🌟
What is the Guided Ask feature?
The Guided Ask assists users primarily in two ways.
1. Helping new users get started with sample questions:
The moment the user clicks on the ask bar, it expands, revealing “question suggestions.” Here, different categories of questions are offered with keywords like what, trend, which, why, how-many, etc. When the user clicks one of them, it displays the various sample questions they can ask under that category, as shown below in Img. 1. This is an excellent way for new business users to quickly familiarize themselves with the Fosfor Decision Cloud’s Decision Designer and the kind of insights they can derive from it.
As the user begins typing, the feature automatically starts identifying missing/incomplete “tokens” from the “prompt” and builds suggestions, making it easier for the user to complete their query.
For example, from the screenshot below (refer to Img. 2), “ap” is an unidentified token. Fosfor immediately shows the warning “Your question contains unidentified tokens” and provides all possible variations of what the user could possibly be trying to ask.
In this case, the system has suggested “APC” (a brand), “Apple” (a brand), “APAC” (a market/region), and “Appliances” (a sub-category) as possible options.
Conclusion
The Fosfor Decision Cloud is on a mission to revolutionize the adoption of AI on the Snowflake Data Cloud. Its new version, with tighter integrations to Cortex and SPCS, is in the beta-testing phase and is expected to be generally available later this year.
We are excited about how the Guided Ask feature is poised to enhance the experience for the existing and new users of the Fosfor Decision Cloud. If you haven’t witnessed the FDC in action yet, book a demo here.
