Most people understand data analytics as a boring sort of mathematics task where vast sets of numbers and statistics are deconstructed and put together again to provide an educated guess about consumer behavior. But if we want to get to the level of smart, precise decision making, we need to be able to parse the subtler meanings of data or the “sentiment.”

Fred Luddy, chief product officer at ServiceNow, Inc., made a point about the important difference between sentiment and, say, a numeric score. Luddy told Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, about his problem with surveys that companies send out with the goal of improving service in the future.

Typically containing several pages of questions with a 1-to-10 ranking system, they are both time consuming and inexact at capturing sentiment. Luddy has a different idea: “If I want someone’s opinion, I ask them a meaningful question. Have them give me a meaningful answer.”

He recounted a recent presentation where participants were asked to Tweet, which, he said, is another way of taking a survey. “We actually expected the results to be quite different, but now in two minutes we had meaningful results from our actual customers on what we should do,” he said. “Talk about market guidance. It’s awesome.”

AI today

Another area where Luddy sees words as more valuable than numbers is AI and machine learning. He said that Big Data is bringing us closer to human brain-like computing every day, but it’s not just the quantity of data. “The real value is in that text, in what did somebody write.”

He concluded: “So AI comes in to start to do analysis of these oceans of texts and develop sentiment and give you real insight into how people feel about things.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge16.

Photo by SiliconANGLE