The core pattern for AskAI is the same regardless of your data persona, but the style and content of that interaction will be different.

#AgileData

AskAI is where a human asks a question and the machine replies, this is repeated until the human gets what they need, then the human goes and undertakes the data work.

I was ruminating on whether the way your AskAI agent/co-pilot interacts should be different depending on your data persona.

And even that sentence above intrigued me, should the AskAI capability have a different name depending on your data persona?

Lets look at two common personas, data/analytics engineer and information consumer.

For the data engineer they are going to give the co-pilot a problem, some data or some code and ask it to help them improve or refine what they are doing. Some examples:

“Here is a table of data, describe it for me”

”Here are multiple tables of data, help me write a query that combines them”

“Here is a field in table of data, help me write some code that will validate the quality of the data”

Data engineers write code, so the AskAI capability will typically help them write code faster or write better code. Once that code has been created the data engineer will then go onto the next data task in the Information Value Stream.

For an Information Consumer they are going to ask a natural language question of their data and they want an answer returned, they will then ask a subsequent question and repeat that until they have the information they need. Once they have the information they need they will then go onto take the business action required. They are at the end of the Information Value Stream.

And so there is the answer, while the core interaction pattern of AskAI is the same for Data Engineers and Information Consumers, i.e human ask a question, machine replies, repeat until the human can complete the data work to be done, the types of questions asked are different and the outputs supplied by the machine are different.

Therefore the interface these two personas use for AskAI should be different, tailored to the data work they need to get done.

For a data engineer the AskAI capability they use will typically be called a co-pilot. For the Information Consumer it will typically be called a chatbot.

Co-pilots are great at working with code, chatbots are great at answering questions.