10 Best AI Tools for Data Analysis

Cem Ruso
Cem Ruso
October 14, 2024
October 22, 2024

Some of the best AI tools for data analysis are Datapad, Tableau, Polymer, KNIME, Microsoft Power BI, Medallia, AnswerRocket, Luzmo, Akkio, and Adverity.

In this article, we walk you through the selection criteria for AI data analysis tools and talk about the products – their features, pros and cons, and pricing.

Factors to Look for When Selecting an AI Tool for Data Analysis

There are 5 factors to consider when selecting an AI tool for data analysis:

  1. Ease of use and adaptability
  2. Model management and updates
  3. Analytical accuracy and speed
  4. Scalability and performance
  5. Automation and analytical capabilities

Let’s see what makes these factors essential individually.

1. Ease of Use and Adaptability

Look for AI data analysis tools that are easy to use and navigate, even for non-technical users. A user-friendly design significantly reduces the learning curve for your team. 

Additionally, ensure the software offers self-help resources and doesn't require extensive training sessions or dev ops guidance to master the tool's workings.

2. Model Management and Updates

AI models require regular updates and constant learning to maintain accuracy and relevance. Especially as your business data changes over time, it's crucial that the chosen software supports model updates and version control, allowing you to adapt to new data trends and requirements without significant downtime or manual intervention. 

3. Analytical Accuracy and Speed

AI can indeed hallucinate. We have seen it with ChatGPT and other AI models, too. Therefore, you must vouch for the tool's analytical accuracy and response time. 

The best way to test the tool's accuracy and reliability is to use the free trial. You can also skim through user reviews to understand any inaccuracies or flaws users have experienced using the platform. 

4. Scalability and Performance

As your data grows, the selected tool should be able to scale accordingly. Evaluate the tool's performance with large datasets and its ability to handle increased workloads without compromising speed or accuracy. 

Scalability is essential for future-proofing your data analysis capabilities as business needs evolve.

5. Automation and Analytical Capabilities

Look for AI data analysis tools with robust automation and analytical capabilities. They must automate monotonous processes such as data collection, harmonization, and preparation for analysis. 

Additionally, ensure the tool can handle different data formats and analyses, like descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, or prescriptive – based on your business needs. 

What Are The 10 Best AI Tools for Business?

1. Datapad

Datapad offers a powerful solution for tracking essential metrics through visually appealing dashboards. Its standout feature is its user-friendly interface, which allows you and your team to track KPIs without technical skills.

Designed specifically for agencies, Datapad simplifies the onboarding process for new clients with one-click templates and enables the sharing of performance reports via read-only links.

The AI insights tool lets anyone detect anomalies in their data and provides actionable to-do items to increase performance.

Key Feature 1. Automated Insights

Datapad’s AI looks through all your data and metrics regularly. It then performs statistical analysis and comes up with important insights (week over week, changes, trends, anomalies, etc.). The end result is an AI-generated graph for every analysis that Datapad does, which you can send over Slack or email to your clients or teammates.

The AI also lets you view all your key events on a timeline, combine data from all sources, and create an overarching analysis to tell you how your business is performing.

You can click through any insights AI gives to dive deeper into the dashboard.

Key Feature 2. AI Assistant

With Datapad’s AI assistant, you can:

  • Ask any questions about your data and get instant answers
  • Query across your marketing stack or your own database
  • Get responses with beautiful charts and tables
  • Add charts to your dashboard
  • Ask questions about a specific data set

Key Feature 3. Ad-Hoc Analysis

Ad-hoc analysis lets you interact with any chart or data point on your mission control dashboard. You can do so by:

  • Select a range of data that you want AI to explain to you
  • Click on a point to deep-dive into a certain attribute
  • Correlate metrics and make data-driven decisions

Pricing

Datapad has a free tier that includes 1 dashboard. If you want more, you can upgrade to the $30 Standard Plan, which includes 3 dashboards and scales with your usage. Datapad also offers a Business Plan tailored for agencies and includes dedicated customer support.

We are now offering an early bird discount to all users, so it's a great time to sign up and give Datapad a spin.

Pros and Cons

✅ Let’s you import KPIs from unlimited data sources in the free plan.

✅ Lets you subscribe to dashboards to get daily highlights.

❌ Variety of charts and graphs selection can be widened.

2. Tableau

Tableau by Salesforce is a powerful BI and data analytics platform. Its AI-powered analytics system simplifies data interpretation and insight consumption at scale.

Features

  • Tableau AI is built on the Einstein Trust Layer and enables the ethical use of AI for  advanced data analysis without compromising data security and privacy.
  • Use Tableau Pulse to automatically detect drivers, trends, and contributors for your business metrics and get AI-powered summarized insights with text and visual explanations.
  • Leverage Data Stories to automatically generate in-depth summaries or "stories" of specific visuals presented in the dashboard.
  • Create trusted, predictive ML models to get predictions and recommendations within Tableau workflows using Eisenstein Discovery.
  • Einstein Discovery for Reports automatically provides AI-powered insights directly within your Salesforce Reports, helping you quickly understand what happened and why so you can take action intelligently.

Pricing

Tableau has three paid plans to choose from:

  • Creator
  • Explorer
  • Viewer

You can contact their sales team to get the pricing depending on the plan and the number of licenses you need.

Pros and Cons

✅ Integrates well with various data sources.

✅ Easily accessible from the cloud, desktop, or mobile app.

❌ Lacks automated report refreshing and scheduling capabilities.

3. Polymer

Polymer is an AI-powered data analysis and visualization software trusted by hundreds of companies, including Spotify, EA Games, Adobe, and IKEA. The platform is easy to use and lays AI on top of your unstructured data for quick visualization and insights.

Features

  • Import data from 20+ data sources and let AI create instant dashboards with relevant metrics and visualizations.
  • Use insights explanations to drill through visuals and get AI-generated summary and prediction for your chosen metric.
  • Leverage PolyAI Chat, a conversational AI model, to ask your data plain English questions and get clear answers via text and visuals within seconds. 
  • Test PolyAI's advanced AI analysis to reveal patterns, trends, and opportunities via text-based prompts. 
  • Polymer lets you choose from 20+ pre-existing dashboard templates or create custom dashboards using a drag-and-drop builder and 20+ visualization elements.

Pricing

Polymer doesn't offer a free plan. However, there's a 7-day free trial. After which you can choose from its paid plans:

  • Starter: $50 per month
  • Pro: $100 per month
  • Teams: $250 per month

Pros and Cons

✅ Easy to use and beginner-friendly.

✅ Extensive catalog of templates and data visualization elements.

❌ Not a team analytics platform.

4. KNIME

KNIME (Konstanz Information Miner) is an open-source data analytics and reporting platform that helps data scientists build and deploy custom analytic models, workflows, and pipelines with low/no code.

Features

  • Offers a visual workflow builder that lets you design, execute and deploy automated workflows as apps or REST APIs. 
  • Create automated workflows and schedule jobs for monotonous works to run data pipelines regularly or in response to specific events.
  • Connect large language models (LLMs) and embeddable AI models provided by OpenAI, Azure, Hugging Face, and GPT4ALL into your analytics workflows to get the most out of your data.
  • Use K-AI, an integrated chat assistant designed to help you with building workflows, writing scripts, creating visualizations, or explaining functionality. 
  • KNIME's predictive analytics capabilities enable users to build and deploy predictive models for forecasting, risk analysis, and decision support. It supports various model types and provides tools for model evaluation and comparison.
  • KNIME integrates with over 300 data sources, databases, big data platforms, LLM model providers, cloud services, and file formats.

Pricing

KNIME features a generous free version for individual use. Other than that, it has four premium plans:

  • Team: $99 per month
  • Basic: $39,900 per year
  • Standard: $71,250 per year
  • Enterprise: Custom pricing

Pros and Cons

✅ Access all popular AI/ML libraries, including LLMs, through an open ecosystem.

✅ Lets you do rapid prototyping and model building.

❌ Limited visualization capabilities.

5. Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI is a dynamic, self-serve analytics platform that lets you easily connect to your own data sources, visualize, and discover important insights.

It offers a range of visualization options and data modeling capabilities catering to the analytical needs of businesses of all sizes.

Features

  • It has an extensive library of over 500+ connectors; it easily connects to local and cloud data sources.
  • Use Narrative with Copilot visual to summarize the data and insights on the page, across your report, or even for your templates; customize the tone, scope, and style of summaries to make them easy to digest. 
  • AutoML enables business analysts to train, validate, and apply machine learning models to their dataflows without requiring data science expertise. 
  • The Q & A visual in Power BI lets you ask questions about the data using natural language and receive visual answers.
  • Power Query Editor provides access to pre-trained machine learning models from Azure Cognitive Services, including Text Analytics functions for sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction, and language detection.
  • Quickly visualize data using bars and charts, tables, line graphs, scatter plots, heatmaps, and more.

Pricing

Power BI offers a free forever plan. Other than that, it has two paid subscriptions to choose from:

  • Power BI Pro: $10 per user per month
  • Power BI Premium: $20 per user per month
  • Power BI Embedded: Custom pricing

Pros and Cons

✅ Extensive catalog of data connectors.

✅ Well-integrated with MS Office 365 app ecosystem.

❌ An outdated UX/UI interface gives PowerBI a steep learning curve.

6. Medallia

Medallia is an AI-powered text analytics tool that is useful for analyzing customer sentiments across channels. Its AI capabilities enable you to extract meaningful insights from customer feedback and day-to-day interactions.

Features

  • Collect customer/employee feedback and conversations across channels, including surveys, social signals, text and video feedback, emails, and SMS/ text messages into a centralized platform. 
  • Smart Response uses generative AI to create personalized editable responses to feedback using the contents of a record in a few clicks.
  • Generate AI-powered Intelligent Summaries for client and customer interaction with details like reasons for contact, issue resolution, and customer satisfaction.
  • Use conditioning or What/If analysis to route agent behavior and responses based on specific topics or words pulled up during conversations.
  • Use Theme Explorer to surface emerging trends and missed opportunities and create alerts based on changes in categorization, sentiment, or any AI model, including effort, CX Risk, or Employee Recognition. 
  • Automatic model management allows Medallia to continually adapt and improve its machine learning models based on new feedback, associated customer data, and usage patterns for the most accurate insights. 

Pricing

Medallia's official website doesn't mention pricing. You can request a demo and then talk about its pricing with their sales team.

Pros and Cons

✅ Excels at text analysis across channels.

✅ Offers AI model management for better accuracy in responses.

❌ The effectiveness of the platform relies heavily on customer participation.

7. AnswerRocket

AnswerRocket is an enterprise-grade AI analytics software. Its AI assistant – Max, integrates with OpenAI's GPT-4 LLM, allowing you to chat, visualize, and analyze data via plain English texts. 

Features

  • Chat with Max in plain text to ask questions about your data, get answers to ad-hoc questions, and run descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive analyses.
  • Use AI to accompany data with interactive visualizations and Max to further explore highs and lows.
  • Set routine analysis tasks on auto-pilot with a schedule or upon data refresh, producing the same reports and presentations your team is used to receiving.
  • Create specialized AI Assistants to help with specific analytics tasks, and tune everything from language, insights, visualizations, presentations and more.
  • Integrates with your existing data infrastructure (structured or unstructured), BI, and productivity tools.

Pricing

AnswerRocket doesn't mention pricing on the official website. You can request a demo and have a conversation about pricing later.

Pros and Cons

✅ Easy to use and set up (also integrates with Slack and MS Teams).

✅ Allows to create dedicated AI models for specific tasks.

❌ Limited accessibility for users who prefer mobile support.

8. Luzmo

Luzmo is an embeddable analytics platform designed for SaaS companies. It was initially launched under the name Cumul.io, reflecting its focus on democratizing data analytics for businesses of all sizes. 

Features

  • Use conversational AI to type in natural language prompts and instantly get chart suggestions or instant charts.
  • Upload designs, screenshots, and sketches into Luzmo and let AI turn them into fully functional dashboards. 
  • Integrate your preferred AI solutions with Luzmo OpenAI ChatGPT-4, Cohere, Gemini, and Mistral AI.
  • Has a growing library of 20+ pre-built data connectors and a flexible plugin architecture.
  • Trigger in-app actions directly from the dashboard, drill-downs on charts, and visual insights with one-click actions.

Pricing

Luzmo offers a 10-day risk-free trial. After that, you can choose from its paid plans:

  • Basic: $995 per month
  • Pro: $2050 per month
  • Elite: $3100 per month

Pros and Cons

✅ Flexibility to choose preferred AI integration.

✅ Extensive data connectors coupled with white-label analytics; a great duo.

❌ Expensive for startups and small businesses.

9. Akkio

Akkio is a generative AI platform designed to simplify analytics and predictive modeling for digital agencies.

It's the only no-code solution amongst Google Cloud AI, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Sagemaker, with the lowest training time (1 minute per model) and cost (free), allowing non-technical business users to apply machine learning to their workflows.

Features

  • Use AI chat to clean, combine, and harmonize your data using natural language prompts.
  • Akkio lets you describe your project or data requirements and analyzes them to create real-time dashboards and reports.
  • Leverage generative AI to train dozens of predictive models, deploy models easily across your tech stack to automatically surface patterns in historical data, and predict future outcomes and critical insights.
  • Use Chat Explore to draw insights, analysis, and visuals from live data using text-based prompts.
  • Integrates with major cloud storages and databases like Snowflake, BigQuery, HubSpot, Salesforce, and more.

Pricing

Akkio offers a generous free trial. Other than that, it has three paid plans:

  • Basic: $49 per user per month
  • Pro: $99 per user per month
  • Build-on package: $999 per month
  • Enterprise: Custom pricing

Pros and cons

✅ Allows for easy deployment and scaling of machine learning models.

✅ Accessible for both technical and non-technical users.

❌ The tool is not suitable for users requiring more control and customization of their AI models and workflows.

10. Adverity

Adverity enables data analysts and marketers to connect, enrich, and manage data from a centralized hub, with AI as a sidekick.

Adverity serves a diverse clientele, including global brands like Ikea and Forbes, and is rapidly gaining traction as businesses increasingly recognize the importance of data-driven decision-making.

Features

  • Use AI-powered naming conventions to eliminate reporting issues and monitor data as they are ingested.
  • Leverage transformation copilot to enrich and blend data your way using simple natural language instructions. 
  • Adverity has the largest catalog of 600+ data connectors, including custom and universal options for uninterrupted data import.
  • Use AI-powered Data Mapping and Data Dictionary to automatically map out source metrics and dimensions for all data sources.
  • Leverage AI-powered Data Quality Copilot and Naming conventions to proactively address all data quality issues before they occur.
  • Share parts of your data with ChatGPT and other AI tools to query, interpret, and access actionable insights in seconds.

Pricing

Adverity doesn't mention pricing on its official website. However, you can fill out a form and contact their sales team to get a quote.

Pros and Cons

✅ Extensive catalog of data connectors.

✅ AI-powered data integration and harmonization capabilities.

❌ Lacks customization options for dashboards and reports.

Wrapping Up

Data analysis is an integral part of any business, and you need the right tools to perform it.

With the software that leverages AI for data analysis, you can tap into your data at a whole new level, get to know the trends and patterns non-AI tools might fail to identify, and generate automated reports to send to your clients and team.

If you or your team don’t have the time to try every product on our list, sign up for Datapad, import your KPIs, and create stunning dashboards for you and your team.