App analytics company Mixpanel incorporates AI so companies can ‘chat with their data’

AI

Mixpanel Inc., a web, mobile and app analytics platform, today announced it’s incorporating generative artificial intelligence so companies can “chat with their data” and get quicker insights into their customer’s experience.

The company’s products provide data analysis for visitors to websites and apps in order to map user behavioral data in order to give marketing and product teams insights with real-time insights. It does so by tracking events, such as users’ flow through an app or webpage, and what they did so customers can build better experiences for their users.

Traditionally, business intelligence and data analysts would need to build complex SQL queries to delve into the data collected, but with event analytics, Mixpanel changed the game with drop-down menus for nontechnical employees to query events.

Now, with the addition of generative AI, users can take it even a step further by employing the power of the AI’s conversational capabilities. Mixpanel is integrating OpenAI LP’s GPT-3.5 Turbo large language model, a technology similar to ChatGPT, which is capable of humanlike speech and understanding, to allow its users to “chat” by simply asking a question and the AI does the work for them.

“Generative AI is the next interface to computing, and it’s unlocking huge productivity gains,” said Mixpanel Chief Executive Amir Movafaghi. “In our world, this means it’s much easier for anyone to query their data in plain English by asking the AI a question. Making analytics accessible, so literally everyone can participate, will significantly improve decision-making across companies.”

A nontechnical user of a ride-hailing app could get a quick answer by asking: “Which group most frequently converts when we apply surge pricing across our key markets?” And the AI would understand the question and build the query in the platform in order to generate a report.

Similarly, a marketer could ask a question regarding trends related to advertising periods and compare it with money spent on advertisements to understand if a campaign had been driving users to a website, or had affected the use of an app. A salesperson could use the AI to see revenue changes over time or understand if users were making it through the cart,  abandoning it early or using certain coupons.

The generative AI integration can understand the English questions, build the appropriate queries, which are run in Mixpanel, and return the relevant charts and conversion trends for user cohorts across different markets.

The company warned that although the new generative AI is extremely powerful, it’s not always going to be accurate. That’s why the new AI-generated queries will allow people to double-check the source of the answer to understand how any report was generated.

The new large language model AI feature will be available to all Mixpanel users, but it will be optional and in addition to the normal user interface. The company added that customer privacy is important and that companies will not need to contribute their data to the LLM, and that it will instead only be used to increase the speed and reduce the effort of building queries. Mixpanel does the analysis of the underlying data.

“Generative AI is a bit like electricity, you can build it into other products to make things faster and easier,” Movafaghi said. “We’re using it to speed up workflows and simplify how people ask questions of their data. But this is just the start, and we expect LLMs will enhance analytics for years to come.”

The new interface is already available to a select group of users as part of a closed beta test program. After the conclusion of the beta, the capability will become available to all Mixpanel customers at no additional cost in the coming weeks, the company said.

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