Business Intelligence Inside Microsoft Teams with Qbo

The state of modern work today is changing how we communicate and collaborate in our businesses. More than ever, getting timely access to information and sharing insights across the organization and a globally distributed team is key to staying competitive.

As we move more towards working virtually, enterprise collaboration platforms are fast becoming hubs for collaboration and teamwork to get projects done and communicate better.

One such platform is Microsoft Teams with over 115 million daily active users and used by over 500,000 organizations worldwide.

While more teams can connect, engage and work with each other, there is still the challenge of making data-driven decisions collaboratively. Effective work needs data and constantly relying on the IT department during collaboration sessions is not only a sink in resource, it is often not feasible.

At Unscrambl, we have created your very own personal data analyst, Qbo, that integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Teams to help drive better meetings where data can be analyzed and shared collaboratively.

Qbo – the Business Intelligence Tool That Lives in Microsoft Teams

Think of Qbo as your AI-powered, personal data analyst that you can bring along into your group discussions and collaboration sessions in Microsoft Teams.

It connects all of your enterprise data sources directly and effortlessly, including Azure Synapse, Azure SQL Database, SQL Server – and enables conversational access to your primary data sources.

This allows you to always bring fresh data into your conversations with your teammates without the need to bring along or rely on your IT department.

Powered by conversational analytics, Qbo allows users to converse with your data in natural language and gain instant insights that will be presented in highly intuitive visualizations – such as interactive charts and boards.

Qbo’s deep integration with Microsoft Teams allows a frictionless, interactive and collaborative data experience, allowing users to share insights in an instant to make smarter decisions together.

4 Ways Qbo Unlocks the Power of Business Intelligence for Better Collaboration

The sharing of data and insights is key to making data-driven decisions and through Qbo’s integration with Microsoft Teams, we are helping to foster this collaboratively throughout every organization.

1) Gain Insights on Demand with Natural Language Queries

Using Qbo, users will be able to ask natural language queries to directly converse with their data to gain insights on-demand.

If you are in a sales meeting, you can easily ask questions such as

"What is our sales revenue by territory in 2019?"
or 
"What was the revenue last year?"

Qbo will process the data and revert with the best fit visualization for the query to help everyone in the chat to better understand the insights being presented.

Also, as Qbo gets used more, our AI helps to suggest follow-up questions to help guide the conversation flow towards better and more in-depth insights.

2) Collaborate in Real-Time in Group & Team Chats

Microsoft Teams is a collaborative platform, and with Qbo we help foster deeper collaborations.

This is done by allowing users in a meeting group to drill down conversationally into questions and insights being shared in the meeting.

For example, if someone starts the data conversation by asking for “Total trips in 2019 by user type”, the question can be further drilled down by another colleague by simply typing in “by start time month”.

This was further drilled down by another colleague. (You can try this for yourself with Citibike NYC data by signing up for a free trial of Qbo.

This allows refinement to be done, allowing groups to collaboratively build reports together seamlessly.

As you move across various conversations and group chats on Microsoft Teams, Qbo allows you to recall charts, allowing you to share previous insights learned in previous sessions or in another chat with your existing or new groups

3) Build Data-oriented Storyboards, Schedule Reports & Share Charts During Live Meetings

While conversing with your colleagues and building charts as you uncover more insights, you can start pinning them onto a board (each of which is attached to a conversation).

You can keep building on the board with new insights and further queries to create a story ready for presentation, all of which are fully customizable.

Once you are ready, the presentation can be started in a click and also sent as a scheduled report to people in your organization.

Qbo also brings the power of Business Intelligence (BI) to the in-meeting experience. While a live-meeting is going on, you’ll be able to bring Qbo into the conversation. This allows you to showcase the charts and insights to your team and discuss the insights with the participants for a more data-driven meeting.

4) Access to Insights & Data Across the Organization

With Qbo, anyone in the meeting (and organization) can get immediate access to data without having to use another tool with a separate login.

Data access is democratized.

That means, within a single group meeting, you can start with a query and get insights from your datasets and a colleague will be able to tap on your datasets to refine the query or ask a separate question to Qbo.

This helps to promote a continuous flow of the meeting, allowing for ideas and discussions to proceed seamlessly without delay.

With Qbo insights integrated with Microsoft teams, users will be able to enjoy more productive and data-driven meetings and unlock a whole host of benefits for the individuals and organization.

Qbo + Microsoft Teams – 3 Key Benefits You Can Expect

With the power of AI-driven conversational analytics, Qbo helps organizations do more and maximize the effectiveness of their meetings on Microsoft Teams.

Organizations will be able to:

1) Enjoy Faster Decision-making Between Team Members and save Time

Despite meeting agendas, many collaborative meetings drag on or are ultimately inconclusive without any clear decision being made.

A big factor of which is the inability to swiftly analyze data for insights and present them seamlessly in a meeting. With Qbo, every participant will be able to conversationally engage with the datasets and gain new insights or clarify existing shared information autonomously.

This helps to foster a proactive rather than reactive meeting atmosphere, allowing decision-makers to drill down into the key points that matter while getting data-driven opinions and buy-ins from the rest of the team.

2) Get on the Same Page as Your Team with Greater Adoption of BI

While the move towards collaborative meetings is getting more commonplace, significant amounts of work are still being done in silos and across independent teams.

A big cause is due to the lack of understanding between departments, and varying levels of adoption between teams. With Qbo, participants will be able to center conversations around data and easily share charts and information from their own function to the group.

This helps to build greater working relationships throughout the organization and makes working collaboratively fun and rewarding, allowing for a bigger adoption of BI and collaboration tools for projects.

3) Empower Users & Unlock True Data-democratization Across the Organization

Traditionally, data and insights are normally locked away from the everyday executive and would require the help of data analysts within the organization’s IT department.

This is a rather inefficient and ineffective way to gain insights. It could take hours or even days to produce analytical data reports sapping precious time away from the analysts and by the time the reports reach the desks of decision-makers, it could be out-dated and unfit for use.

With Qbo, users across an organization will be able to experience true data-democratization by having access to insights on-demand by simply asking conversational questions directly to the datasets.

Converse with Your Data in Microsoft Teams & Make Data-driven Decisions with Qbo

At Unscrambl, we believe in unlocking the full potential of teamwork and collaboration through the power of data democratization.

Qbo on Microsoft Teams allows users to foster a data-centric culture of collaboration and make data the anchor around which discussions and strategies can be developed to work smarter and compete harder.

Embark on a 14-day free trial of Qbo and see the benefits of Business Intelligence in action for yourself.