I have been highlighting in many of my posts that a critical part of truly becoming data-driven is to make data and analytics tools fun to use. A few years ago, I suggested that they could be interactive, like video games, which would make it interesting and fun for users to play with these tools. The more they become interested, the more they will learn how to leverage these tools optimally.

One of the key challenges of many analytics tools is that they become an additional task when forced upon the users. I am not talking about just the learning curve. Once they have learned, they find it painful to navigate through the tool to get what they want. Before the tool arrived, they had developed their own hacks to get fast access to this data. Now, the tool does not allow that. So, the tool ended up making their day-to-day work more difficult. Among many other seeds, this becomes the seed of dislike for the tool. The result is that the aspects of the tool that can make the organization “data-driven” are never utilized prudently.

But Generative UI can change that!

What exactly is Generative UI? 

Generative UI pertains to a capability that can help create a dynamic and adaptive user interface in real-time. In real-time, this interface understands user intents, needs, and context and adapts accordingly. This capability allows you to hyper-personalize user experiences, making them more personalized, efficient, and fun. 

As you can imagine, with this capability, no two users will have the same UI. The dynamic UI generation capability means personalized content, visualizations, product recommendations, tutorials, and more — to provide an optimized, responsive experience for each user. 

The gist is that generative UI allows user interfaces to become highly context-aware, adaptive, and personalized at scale.

All leading device companies currently offer users the capability to personalize some rudimentary aspects of their user interface. We have to manually change those settings, but they are still pretty vanilla. But in our personal lives, we are eager to learn the complexity because we want to. The truth of life is that the same zeal is not present for everyone when they are at work. Some people love exploring technology and tools, so they jump into the rabbit hole of a new tool at work. Other, not so much.

So, the very first powerful impact of analytics will be that it can make these tools fun and interesting for Generative UI users with minimal effort. As users interact more and more, the personalization of UI becomes better and better. The “learning curve” becomes significantly minimal, thereby reducing the resistance to learning something totally new.

The other aspect, or power of Generative UI, is that this will help employees develop a”data-driven” mindset. In 10-15 years from now, employees will not have to interact with a tool intensively to get insights. The challenge of having to learn a tool will be minimal. They could just converse with a solution to get insights. So, as you can imagine, it is not the tool that will make the employees data-driven, but the ability to ask the right questions at the right time. That is what is called the data-driven mindset. The good news is that it is a learned capability and Generative AI can help develop this in your employees.

If your kid was in elementary school recently, you know that many interactive games are available these days to help kids develop their math and reading skills. Our capability to learn diminishes as adults, not just because the brain is not expanding but also because of our perceptions, inhibitions, notions, and biases. But Generative UI can change that. I can think of plenty of ways it can be leveraged to fundamentally change how users see their analytics as well as enterprise planning tools and become engrossed with the tool to a level so that they start enjoying it. It then becomes an incentive to think so that they can continue interacting, thereby building a true data-driven mindset.

This is just one area that Generative UI can impact. The fact is, it can transform many other areas, like E-Commerce. I will be touching upon some of them in my subsequent articles.