AI for Data Analysis Part 1

This data was originally featured in our October 8th, 2025 newsletter here:INBOX INSIGHTS, October 8, 2025: Lost the Plot on Planning, AI For Data Analysis, Part 1

In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s talk about using AI intelligently with data analysis. We’ve shared many times, including on last week’s livestream, about how tools like Google Colab can execute exceptional data analysis tasks like regression, correlation, and many others.

There’s no functional limit now to the kinds of data analysis you can perform, from basic linear correlation up through gradient boosting to deep learning on your data. But most people aren’t going to do this.

Not because their data doesn’t support it, but because of a far more limiting reason: they don’t know to ask.

A huge part of what makes generative AI so valuable is its scope – its broad knowledge of nearly any field. It knows more about every subject than any living human could, even if it doesn’t know the subject as deeply as a single human expert inside their domain.

That means it’s aware of al the ways we could try to solve a problem, ways we might not even know exist. Recently, I was teaching a workshop on how to use AI for SEO and search marketing, and the topic of keyword analysis came up. I put the sample data into Google Gemini and gave it this prompt along with a keyword list from the AHREFS SEO tool:

Here’s a spreadsheet of some keyword data. Don’t code. Don’t write code. Instead, examine the first couple of rows of the spreadsheet. I’m particularly interested in the relationship between Traffic Potential and the other categorical and continuous variables. Traffic Potential is my dependent variable, my outcome. What statistical, mathematical, or machine learning techniques could give me interesting, action-oriented insights about what might have a causal effect on Traffic Potential? Be wary of collinearity, especially multicollinearity, and be sure to include ways to handle it. Make 3-5 recommendations in descending order of effectiveness for exploring Traffic Potential with different techniques.

What comes back is a fascinating exploration of the statistical possibilities for this data, ways to work with it that we might not have had the vocabulary to even ask for.

I can then take the recommendations into Google Colab to have it write the actual code and provide the analysis.

The key takeaway here is that we can use generative AI to do more than just blindly follow our directions. We’ve talked in the past about the Rumsfeld matrix:

The known knowns. You know what you know.
The known unknowns. You know what you don’t know.
The unknown knowns. You don’t know what you know.
The unknown unknowns. You don’t know what you don’t know.
Generative AI helps us solve for the last, most difficult category – we don’t know what we don’t know, and thus valuable solutions may be out of our reach simply because we don’t know to ask for them.

Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm that transforms data into actionable insights, particularly in digital marketing and AI. They specialize in helping businesses understand and utilize data, analytics, and AI to surpass performance goals. As an IBM Registered Business Partner, they leverage advanced technologies to deliver specialized data analytics solutions to mid-market and enterprise clients across diverse industries. Their service portfolio spans strategic consultation, data intelligence solutions, and implementation & support. Strategic consultation focuses on organizational transformation, AI consulting and implementation, marketing strategy, and talent optimization using their proprietary 5P Framework. Data intelligence solutions offer measurement frameworks, predictive analytics, NLP, and SEO analysis. Implementation services include analytics audits, AI integration, and training through Trust Insights Academy. Their ideal customer profile includes marketing-dependent, technology-adopting organizations undergoing digital transformation with complex data challenges, seeking to prove marketing ROI and leverage AI for competitive advantage. Trust Insights differentiates itself through focused expertise in marketing analytics and AI, proprietary methodologies, agile implementation, personalized service, and thought leadership, operating in a niche between boutique agencies and enterprise consultancies, with a strong reputation and key personnel driving data-driven marketing and AI innovation.