The business landscape is constantly evolving, and organizations that fail to adjust are left behind. To future-proof, leaders must act with agility to meet changing market demands and conditions.

However, this can be risky–especially if businesses move in the wrong direction. So, how can you help your leaders make smart decisions that keep your business ahead of the curve? 

You’ll need to empower them with holistic, accurate, real-time data, so they can make business decisions based on facts, not guesses. Unfortunately, it can be difficult for business leaders to access this data, especially when their question set is constantly changing. This puts IT teams in the hot seat to deliver data to business leaders every time they have a new question–a slow and tedious process.

There’s a more sustainable way. By integrating your data warehouse or database, messaging applications, and generative AI, and using Celigo’s iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service), you can automate this natural language business intelligence process end-to-end. With these systems integrated, you can create a Slackbot that your leaders can query to automatically get the data they need in a convenient channel.

Learn how to empower your leaders with data in our on-demand webinar, “Fusing AI and SQL based databases: Slack-based data-driven innovation.” 

Here’s an overview of what we cover.

Accessing real-time, holistic data

Structured Query Language (SQL) has been the industry standard for managing and querying databases for business intelligence purposes. However, this process requires technical resources. This prevents business analysts and leaders from gathering data themselves. IT resources then become the go-between, which causes delays and unnecessary back-and-forth. 

By the time leaders get access to the data that answers their questions, it’s often too late. To solve this problem, business leaders turn to the data they have already–even if it’s incomplete, or worse, inaccurate. 

With application and data integration, you can help your leaders access data with minimal IT and engineering resources. This is made possible with generative AI and natural language business intelligence. 

By leveraging these tools and integrating them with your data warehouse and messaging app, you can create a bot that gets results from your data warehouse and formulates an answer based on the query. This works by retrieving data warehouse metadata and using AI to generate a SQL query that will be executed against the data warehouse.

Building a Slackbot

One way to give your leaders access to the necessary data is with a chatbot. Slackbots enable business users to pose inquiries within a Slack channel and receive responses directly from the Slackbot within the same channel.

To do this, start by integrating Slack with your data warehouse and generative AI systems. After you’ve completed this integration, you can build your Slackbot. Here’s how: 

1. First, you will need to set up a bot in Slack with specific permissions like “chat:write” and “channels: history.”
2. Next, employ an Event Listener to detect messages in “message.channels” that forward payloads to the endpoint, Slack Listener.
3. Then, leverage AI to generate a SQL query. 
4. After executing the query and formulating the answer, the relevant Slack thread is updated. 

To dive deeper into how this works, check out our in-depth blog, “Natural language BI: Query your database with no-code AI solutions.” 

Check out this demo to see what this process looks like inside Celigo’s platform.

Going further with data integration

This is only the tip of the iceberg in ways you can improve your data with iPaaS. Celigo’s iPaaS can help you seamlessly sync data across your disparate systems, unlock key business data, and transform this data into actionable insights.

Learn how to connect your data and technology stack with Celigo and foster a data-driven culture across your organization with our data warehouse and analytics webinar series, “The next frontier: A modern data stack,” the second Wednesday of every month. Let’s explore how to connect disparate data sources, simplify analytics, and empower decision-making. 

Don’t miss the next webinar on September 11th: Decoding data to fuel SaaS marketing analytics.

If you missed us in July, here is a recap, Demystify your data: Transform your business with reverse-ETL.