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Today marks the launch of an important new Pigment capability - Insights.
Insights leverages AI to provide automated variance and contribution analysis, eliminating the need for manual drill-downs. By scoring underlying data, it intelligently identifies the most relevant dimensions and properties, presenting key drivers in clear visualizations and written summaries.
Insights also prompts the user with recommended next steps, pointing you toward areas that deserve further scrutiny based on your search query or the data that’s been uncovered, streamlining and guiding your analysis.
Once it’s complete, you can save the charts generated to one of your Boards, or easily share the summaries with other team members.
Sometimes things don't seem to warrant attention on the surface. Insights can help verify whether, even if your topline numbers (or any metric you track) is performing as expected, the underlying drivers have had big swings worth investigating. For instance, if your global profits might be tracking vs. plan but the contribution of each of your segments is very different than anticipated.
Let’s take a look at some example use cases in detail.
Variance analysis
Instead of manually filtering through reports and pivot tables, Insights automatically identifies the top contributors of variances - whether it’s a shift in revenue, costs, or headcount. This helps you quickly spot trends and make informed decisions.
Variance analysis can be applied across different timeframes and versions. Examples include:
Period-over-period analysis
Identify trends by comparing Month-over-Month (MoM), Quarter-over-Quarter (QoQ), or Year-over-Year (YoY) performance.
Version comparisons
Track deviations between Actuals vs. Budget, Actuals vs. Forecast, or Forecast vs. Forecast.
This will help you identify variance in…
- Revenue
A sudden decline in total revenue needs further analysis. Insights helps users break down revenue shifts by region, industry, or customer type to pinpoint whether specific countries or segments are underperforming. - Cost
A significant increase in operational expenses requires investigation. Insights identifies changes in fixed vs. variable costs and detects whether increases stem from new vendors, increased service costs, or unexpected spikes in specific expense categories. - Gross margin/profit
If gross margin is fluctuating, users need to understand the root cause. Insights breaks down profitability by product category, helping to identify areas where margins are compressing. - Headcount and compensation
If salary costs are misaligned with budget expectations, Insights can highlight which departments are contributing to the variance—whether due to delayed hiring, structural salary adjustments, or workforce reductions. - Marketing and advertising spend
A sharp rise in marketing expenses warrants closer examination. Insights enables users to analyze which campaigns, regions, or channels are driving the variance.
Drill-down analysis
With Insights users can receive an automated breakdown of the most relevant dimensions and top contributing factors behind a figure. Examples include:
- A finance team is reviewing total revenue at a regional level and needs to see which countries or segments contributed the most to an increase or decline.
- An operations team notices an unexpected increase in total expenses and wants to uncover whether it is driven by specific vendors, cost centers, or other dimensions.
- A product team is examining gross margin shifts and wants to identify which product categories or business lines had the biggest impact.
Data validation
When importing or transforming data, Insights can check for consistency, highlighting unexpected deviations. For example:
- Load data validation
When loading new data, unexpected deviations in key business metrics can go unnoticed, leading to incorrect decisions. Insights helps automatically detect anomalies, such as missing vendors, significant discrepancies between periods, or unexplained spikes. - Data transformation validation
If data transformations are applied across many Metrics, verifying the accuracy of calculations can be time-consuming. Insights can automate the process of detecting inconsistencies by comparing initial, intermediate, and final values.
This enables users to drill down into data to better understand the impact of underlying factors and focus on them.
Learn more about Pigment’s AI functionality here.
