Cloverpop’s Human-First, AI-Based Decision Intelligence Platform

Should we change our pricing strategy? What new products should our company develop? How do we address customer demand? Companies make millions of decisions like this every year. With business impacts ranging from $100K to $1B+, these decisions are your company's greatest assets.

However, the decision-makers responsible for your company's growth, direction, and success must make better decisions faster than ever in an extraordinarily complex environment. And the stakes are high: the 2020 Bain & Company Global Retooling Survey found that companies with high decision effectiveness outperformed their peers by 4-5 times on shareholder return over five years, while a 2019 Gartner study determined that when companies improve their decision quality, those companies can expect a 3-6% improvement in EBITDA.

Decision-Making Breakdowns

I've dedicated my career to understanding the breakdowns in the decision-making process and developing human-first AI-based solutions that permanently address these systematic breakdowns. In my experience, there are six primary blockers to transforming decision-making culture: 

• Companies don't keep complete records of their decisions. I call this a culture of decision amnesia because companies don't remember key elements of prior decisions. For example, when was this decision made, and by whom? Knowing how you reached a decision is as important as knowing what the decision was. 
• Companies aren't learning and improving. Without consistent and accurate records, it is almost impossible to continuously improve your processes or ensure all decision-makers are aligned to transform your decision-making culture.  
• Companies aren't sharing best practices. If companies can't capture their practices, how can they share them or train employees to make decisions correctly? 
• Decision-making can be a long process. Between initial coordination, multiple meetings, developing and reviewing recommendations and finally making a decision, your entire process can take weeks to months. This extends the cycle time of decisions and makes it even more important to start soon.
• Decisions may be low quality with a low success probability. Decision-makers do their best, but with nebulous decision-making practices and a high-stress environment, people sometimes make poor decisions with a low likelihood of success. This can make the challenge feel even more intimidating.
• Companies waste 60% of data and analytics investments.  Companies spend a lot of money on data and analytics. But, when pressed for a decision, who has time to parse through the information besides actually synthesizing it to inform a high-quality decision? This is unsurprising since much of this data is not truly meant for humans to parse. Arguably, no matter how intelligent people are, most decision-makers don't know how to use data to its full potential.

A long-term fix for these problems must fit the workplace culture, integrate the correct information and people, ease the burden on decision-makers, and be based on an infinitely replicable system.

The Decision Intelligence Solution

So, what is the solution? My decades of experience have shown that we need a bridge that reaches past data and recommendations to a place where we can embrace decisions, actions and results while continuously learning and improving. This solution must be data-informed while allowing diverse thought approaches and facilitating the decentralization of decision-making. Finally, it must reflect the culture and values of a company. 

The solution is a specific application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that I call Decision Intelligence (DI). Our Cloverpop platform brings the rigors of decision science to the business world, integrating data and human inputs into a seamless process that fixes broken elements in the decision-making chain with three core AI strategies:

• Generative AI: Capturing and structuring company decision logic into tailored, repeatable decision-making frameworks.
• Synthesis AI: Automating the analysis, insight generation and recommendation process to reduce cost, effort and decision-making cycle time.
• Learn AI: Optimizing decision frameworks to make those decisions ever faster and better based on past decisions and outcomes.

To do this, Cloverpop starts by considering a business decision your company faces, for example, should your company change material suppliers? The platform then will Structure the most important questions or "drivers" that maximize business objectives and include applicable data from extensive data sets and inputs of your company's choice in a complete decision framework. Going further, we are also testing decision-mining capabilities to create structured decision trees from meeting transcripts and other unstructured data.

Once the structured decision framework is in place, our DI workflows help teams Collaborate around a decision-centric communication system, eliminating inefficient emails and meetings, empowering your teams and bringing minds together regardless of work location.

The next step is synthesizing data, generating insights and developing recommendations to Automate decision-making. Cloverpop’s D-Sight AI engine can automatically develop these recommendations faster than human-only teams, using the most pertinent data, KPIs and inputs to reduce your time-to-decision from weeks or months to days or even hours.

Finally, Cloverpop tracks and measures decision results. Companies should treat decisions as strategic assets, yet, as you recall, decision amnesia is frequently a broken element in the chain. DI technology like Cloverpop builds an extensive archive of company records from which it can Learn from past decisions to address current challenges.  

Making swift, data and human-informed decisions in keeping with company values and past strategies is a game changer. But the real value is unlocked after such a system is in place and the detailed records of past decisions and their outcomes are used as an AI training set. Cloverpop’s AI learns from these experiences how to make your most important decisions faster and better in a human+AI collaboration loop. As our DI platform observes and learns, it will optimize your decision-making frameworks and processes for decisions with ever greater success probabilities, directly translating into better business outcomes. After all, today's business environment requires every aspect of your business strategy to be finely tuned and highly responsive.

Bringing The Human And The Machine Together

At this point, it's essential to recognize that some people may feel concerned that AI technology will replace decision-makers. However, a successful DI platform recognizes that humans make the decision and is constructed around a desire to help companies fix what's broken in the decision-making process. To that end, humans are not just important but critical and irreplaceable. DI's job is to leverage human expertise in a way that captures and codifies their brilliance. 

Cloverpop’s DI platform brings the human and the machine together to create a decision-making framework that custom fits your business and goals and leverages your teams’ incredible wealth of knowledge and expertise. Using your inputs, data and analytics, machine learning, and business intelligence, DI generates decision and action recommendations that bring value to your company. If you are ready to solve your decision process problems, see how Cloverpop's AI-based platform can power your company to an era of better, faster decision-making.