Understanding the "what" and the "why" behind the numbers

 

Understanding the "what" and the "why" behind the numbers

Statistics is derived from a collection of data made up of numbers. Numbers can be manipulated to create a distorted picture. This is especially true when companies that use Machine Learning based AI to evaluate businesses. In all cases, it is a game of data science and management's point of view on top-line and bottom line. When partial is used to represent the whole, there is plenty of rooms for misrepresentation.

Take a recent news article on how much money Google estimates Microsoft's cloud business is actually losing. A leaked document from Google shows Microsoft's Azure business had roughly $3 billion operating loss in fiscal 2022. On the other hand, the analysis from an analyst at Cowen shows Azure with an operating profit of 30%.


Who to believe?


We let ELAINE analyzed Microsoft's 2022/10/25 earnings transcript to look for clues. ELAINE discovers many challenges facing Microsoft's business. Among many other things, here is one that stands out:

"In capital expenditures, we expect a sequential increase on a dollar basis with normal quarterly spend variability in the timing of our cloud infrastructure build-out."


Symbolic AI catches details overlooked by human understanding


With Symbolic Logic AI such as ELAINE, that is based on propositional logic and symbolic logic, looking for reasons and supporting facts, it exposes details that could be overlooked by human understanding. It gives a different perspective.

As reported, "Microsoft provides year-over-year growth for Azure and other cloud services but doesn't give a dollar figure, nor does it specify how much of the growth comes just from Azure".

The devil is in the details. That's where narrative analysis will give the "what" and the "why" behind the numbers.

When applied in sales and marketing lead generation, ELAINE's abstractions helps to turn business pain-points into sales opportunities for outside sales teams.

Business intelligence is readily at hand by reading 10-K, earnings transcript and investor day presentations. Today, it remains an exhausting manual task for most people.


ELAINE - The first automated narrative analysis with abstractions


Now, there is ELAINE that walks the walk and talks the talk. ELAINE analyzes these documents on demand and provides a summary of headwind, tailwind and imperatives for $.001 per character that it analyzes. Seeing is believing. Sign up to take a test drive.