Table of Contents
McKinsey says that companies that use AI for analytics are 23 times more likely to acquire customers. But most businesses still have to wait days or weeks for their analytics teams to answer important questions that AI could answer in minutes.
Why Ask AI Instead of Using Traditional Analytics
When you ask AI for business insights, you’re using a system that can handle millions of data points at once, without the slowdown that comes with human analysis. Even the best analytics teams have their limits. They need time to clean data, build models, create visualizations, and schedule meetings to discuss findings.
The speed advantage alone is convincing. What would take an analytics team 40 hours to compile, AI can often deliver in under 60 seconds.
But being fast isn’t everything. AI also gets rid of confirmation bias, which is when people naturally only look at the information that supports their beliefs. Your analytics team might unconsciously look for patterns that support existing theories. AI doesn’t care about office politics or protecting previous decisions. It just shows what the data actually shows, even if those insights go against what most people think or show that a company made mistakes in its plans.
Choosing the Right AI Platform
This begs the question: where do you even start? Many business management software already include AI analytics. However, if you’re just starting out, I suggest using conversational assistants — at least at first.
Why? You can get immediate and in-depth insights without needing a technical team (just make sure the platform you use offers the data privacy you need). Out of all the options, these are my top three:
1. Overchat AI
I work on the Overchat AI team, so I might be a bit biased, but I would still say that our platform is a great place to start if you’re new to using AI analytics. You can upload your data in different formats and ask AI questions about it. We pride ourselves on our simple interface that anyone can use. The platform can handle CSV, PDF, Markdown files and unstructured text equally well, so it’s great for getting insights quickly, without having to invest a lot of resources into an advanced integration with business management or analytics software.
2. Claude
Although Claude’s 200,000 context window is smaller than Gemini’s, which can handle up to 2 million tokens, it’s still great at managing and processing a lot of information. That’s why it comes in at #2 on this list. It’s also a very good component coder, and it can create dashboards to visualize your data as you go.
3. Gemini
Google’s Gemini works perfectly with Google Workspace tools, so it’s great for businesses that already use Google’s ecosystem. It’s especially useful when analyzing data from Google Analytics, Ads, and Sheets.
Things to Do Before You Ask AI Questions
Preparing your data correctly will result in better output. Before you ask AI to do something, make your data sources into clear, organized formats. Do these things:
- Delete any duplicate entries
- Make sure the date formats are all the same
- Make sure the numbers you enter don’t have any letters or spaces
- If you’re looking at customer data, make sure to remove any information that could identify a person. This will help you follow the rules about privacy
Now, earlier, I said that I would start with analyzing AI using chatbots. They understand context, which is one of the main reasons why.
Here’s the key tip: explain to the AI assistant what your business model is, what industry standards you follow, and any unique things that affect your operations.
AI works best when it knows everything about the situation. So it’s helpful to start with a chat and establish some groundwork before sending in the data. For example, if you work in e-commerce, you might first tell the chatbot about your average order value, how much it costs to get new customers.
But stick to the facts. For example, if you say, even in passing, that you suspect that customer behavior may change with the seasons, the AI might force that trend on the interpretation, even if it’s not real.
The 5 Critical Questions
Now that we’ve gone over that, let’s look at the five questions and their respective prompts (at Overchat AI, we use these almost daily).
1. “What’s Driving Our Revenue?”
This is designed to make the AI look deep — at more than just the surface-level metrics — to find out what is driving your business forward.
While your dashboard already shows total revenue, AI can show you hidden trends and triggers. Price changes, changes in sales volume, changes in customer profiles, effects from the market, and how all of that links to all of the things you’ve been recently doing.
Prompt: “Analyze my revenue data [paste your monthly revenue data with columns for date, product/service, customer segment, region, unit price, and quantity sold]. Identify the top 3 factors driving revenue changes over the past [specify timeframe]. Break down the contribution of price vs. volume, new vs. existing customers, and product mix shifts. Highlight any concerning trends or dependencies.”
2. “Which Customers Are Most Likely to Churn?”
Keeping customers is key to making a profit. According to Bain & Company, if you keep 5% more customers, you can increase your profits by 25-95%. AI can identify signs that your team might miss by looking at hundreds of behavioral indicators at the same time. It looks at how often things are used, the feelings in support tickets, payment delays, and how customers interact with the company. This information can show when a customer might leave.
Prompt: “Using this customer data [paste data including customer ID, tenure, purchase frequency, last purchase date, support tickets, payment history, and engagement metrics], identify customers with >70% churn probability in the next 90 days. Rank them by revenue impact and provide specific behavioral indicators for each at-risk segment. Suggest targeted retention strategies based on their churn triggers.”
3. “Which Change to Our Funnel Will Provide Maximum Impact?”
To improve conversion rates, it’s important to understand how people move through the different stages of the sales funnel. AI can create thousands of scenarios instantly and calculate the combined effects of improvements at each stage.
Prompt: “Here’s my funnel data [paste conversion rates for each stage, traffic volume, and average transaction value]. Model the revenue impact of a 10% improvement at each funnel stage. Account for downstream effects and capacity constraints. Identify the single change that would generate the highest ROI within [specify timeframe and budget constraints].”
4. “Which of Our Marketing Channels Performs the Best/Worst?”
Marketing attribution is one of the most complex challenges in analytics. AI can untangle multi-touch attribution, accounting for channel interactions, time decay, and seasonal effects that simple last-click models miss.
Prompt: “Analyze my marketing performance data [paste data with columns for channel, spend, impressions, clicks, conversions, and revenue by time period]. Calculate the true ROI for each channel using multi-touch attribution. Include assisted conversions and cross-channel effects. Identify underperforming channels and recommend optimal budget reallocation to maximize overall ROI.”
5. “What Hidden Correlations or Insights Do You See in This Data?”
Sometimes the most valuable insights are the ones you didn’t know to look for. AI is really good at finding patterns that humans might not notice.
Prompt: “Examine this dataset [paste your complete business data] for unexpected correlations, anomalies, or patterns. Focus on relationships with >0.7 correlation coefficient that aren’t immediately obvious. Identify any leading indicators of performance changes and potential risk factors I should monitor. Surprise me with insights I wouldn’t have thought to investigate.” Also, consider how trends might relate to products like MacBook 2025.
Bottom Line
These five questions are just the beginning. As you start to understand how AI can help your business, you’ll find many more ways to use it. Start with one question today. The insights you gain might fundamentally change how you view your business tomorrow.