(US and Canada) Anish Gandhi, Director of Analytics and Sales Operations, Glassdoor, speaks with Daniel Gray, VP Sales Engineering, AtScale about delivering self-service data and analytics, and measuring ROI for data-analytics investments in an organization.

Gandhi says that self-service data and analytics don’t work without scaling and automation because eventually there will be transformation and business strategy changes which will then lead to the need to pivot quickly. He mentions that scaling and automation is the most effective way to drive analytics in an organization. The use cases can be like automated delivery of information on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis where information comes automatically to users and it is possible only with a scalable and automated platform.

Sharing his views on the future of AI and machine learning for enterprises he says that the adoption differs from organization to organization and also depends on the maturity of the organization, the culture, and the buy-in at the top level. Gandhi does believe that the adoption and engagement will increase with time.

Next, he goes on to discuss the ways to measure ROI to justify investments in data and analytics. The number one measure in his opinion is the traffic and the usage. That is, the number of users accessing the platform regularly to manage their team, business, and performances. This shows in the fall in the number of ad-hoc requests and siloed analysis, making way for standardized analytics available across the businesses.

The second is the reduction in the noise from data over time. And the third biggest ROI is when the company is growing with more users being added without having to add additional resources for analytics as the system is already built to be scalable. There is no increase in the operational cost of adding more people to the analytics or operations.