{"id":72510,"date":"2024-04-12T08:48:56","date_gmt":"2024-04-12T06:48:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/intellias.com\/?post_type=blog&p=72510"},"modified":"2025-12-12T13:04:40","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T11:04:40","slug":"the-rise-of-domain-specific-llms-for-data-analytics","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/intellias.com\/domain-specific-llms-for-data-analytics\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rise of Domain-Specific LLMs for Data Analytics"},"content":{"rendered":"
Ironically, businesses aren\u2019t getting better at making decisions even though they have more access to data and analytics tools than ever. Sixty-four percent of chief financial officers surveyed by Deloitte<\/a> name inadequate technologies\/systems as one of the three greatest challenges in turning data into insights.<\/p>\n You might ask: Aren\u2019t data analytics budgets growing year over year?<\/em> They are. But so is the volume, variety, and complexity of data.<\/p>\n Businesses are paying a lot for data infrastructure and business intelligence (BI) tools, but they often see a small return on investment (ROI) and a big list of complaints from end-users about the tools\u2019 complexity, lengthy setup cycles, etc.<\/p>\n What if your team could write text-based questions instead of complex SQL queries? The combination of large language models (LLMs) and data analytics promises to commoditize access to analytics.<\/p>\n Traditional data analytics tools work with structured and numerical data. Large language models (LLMs), in turn, can interpret human language and extract sentiments, speech patterns, and specific topics from unstructured textual data.<\/p>\n By fusing LLMs with data analytics, businesses can use more data points, plus create a conversational interface to explore them<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Data Analytics<\/p>\n It\u2019s quite possible that you have already asked ChatGPT to perform some analytics tasks in your industry and had mixed results.<\/p>\n General-purpose LLMs like Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) weren\u2019t explicitly trained to run route optimization scenarios<\/a> for different types of electric vehicles (EVs), for example. But thanks to various model fine-tuning techniques, you can teach general-purpose models to:<\/p>\n Effectively, fine-tuned LLMs help accomplish two things for data analytics<\/strong>: Improve access to different data assets through a conversational interface and help deliver more comprehensive, contextually relevant insights.<\/p>\n That\u2019s exactly how many data-driven companies already use LLMs. Colgate-Palmolive, for example, uses generative AI<\/a> to synthesize consumer and shopper insights and better capture consumer sentiment. Morgan Stanley has launched an AI workforce assistant<\/a>, which can handle a range of research inquiries (What\u2019s the projected interest rate increase in April 2024?<\/em>) and general admin queries (How can I open a new IRA account?<\/em>).<\/p>\n According to a 2023 global study by Amazon Web Services, 80% of chief data officers<\/a> expect that generative AI will positively transform their organization\u2019s business environment \u2014 and for some good reasons.<\/p>\n By augmenting existing business analytics processes with LLMs, teams across functions can get answers to questions that previously required at least one business analyst or data scientist. Advantages of using LLMs for data analytics include:<\/p>\n Unlike regular data analytics and machine learning models<\/a>, LLMs can perform semantic search, taking into account the meaning and intention behind a user\u2019s query to provide a more relevant answer. For that, the models employ embeddings<\/em>: vector-based representations of relationships between words, phrases, and data points. Thanks to embeddings, LLMs can locate data points that closely relate to the user\u2019s intent and return nuanced and context-aware answers. Effectively, LLMs can transform vast amounts of textual data into precise insights, plus combine this information with numerical data to provide more comprehensive information to users.<\/p>\n Intelligent Automation<\/p>\n So, what exactly can LLMs do for data analysis? Let\u2019s take a look at several labor-intensive knowledge tasks companies can streamline:<\/p>\n LLMs like GPT and BERT can perform semantic searches<\/strong>. This can make a huge difference in sentiment analysis, revealing whether a customer thinks your product is \u201cterrible\u201d versus \u201cterribly awesome!\u201d<\/p>\n Open-source large language models are already rather good at scanning for context but they can further improve information extraction by using vector databases.<\/p>\n Vector databases<\/strong> convert unstructured data (such as texts) into mathematical vectors that indicate word meanings and semantic relationships between them (known as word embeddings). This helps the model better distinguish the intent behind a user\u2019s query and generate more accurate results. For example, a vector database can help to ensure that your customer is talking about Java the programming language and not Java the Indonesian island.<\/p>\n Source: Semantic Scholar<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n A pair of words that possess similar meanings or occur frequently in similar contexts will share a vector relationship.<\/p>\n To improve LLM performance, you can create custom embeddings for your domain or use a pre-trained open-source model like Word2Vec<\/a>, GTE-Base<\/a>, RoBERTa<\/a>, or MPNet V2<\/a>. By fusing LLMs and business analytics tools, you can get 360-degree insights based on structured data points (NPS scores) and unstructured data points (text complaints). For example, Intellias recently helped a client deploy a brand performance tracker<\/a> that combines NLP, generative AI, and traditional data analytics methods.<\/p>\n The business solution can collect data from external sources \u2014 social media, blog posts, reviews, etc. \u2014 and transform it into accurate reputational indices. As a result, the brand marketing team no longer needs to manually review media coverage to assess the impact of recent promotional campaigns. Instead, they can get condensed and prioritized data from a GPT model, along with accurate assessments of recent brand mentions from all around the web.<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, you can program an LLM to collect sentiment from mediums like images, audio, or video. Sonnet<\/a>, for example, is fine-tuning the GPT-4 model to pick up important insights from voice and video conversations related to sales deals, customer demos, user interviews, or even morning standups. The ultimate goal is to create a conversational<\/a> assistant that can deliver insights on what customers resonate with, or complain about.<\/p>\n Almost unanimously, business leaders agree that data drives better decisions, and yet a recent Salesforce survey<\/a> has found that only 33% use data to decide on pricing in line with economic conditions. And no, it\u2019s not that teams lack business intelligence tools in the first place. What they lack is the ability to interpret available data.<\/p>\nHow LLMs and data analytics enable data-driven workflows<\/h2>\n
How LLMs enhance data analytics<\/h3>\n
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Benefits of combining LLMs and data analytics<\/h2>\n
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6 viable combinations of LLMs with data analytics<\/h2>\n
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Customer sentiment analysis<\/h3>\n
<\/p>\nSales analytics<\/h3>\n
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