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Welcome back to Gemini: Strategic Edge. In our last issue, we explored how AI can create proactive and personalized customer experiences. A key challenge in achieving that, however, is that customer data, and indeed all enterprise data, is often fragmented across disconnected systems.
This issue tackles that fundamental business challenge: breaking down internal data silos. We will explore how Gemini can function as a universal data translator, enabling seamless cross functional analysis and unlocking a truly unified view of the enterprise.
Consider the persistent problem of data silos: your marketing team operates within their marketing automation platform, sales lives in the CRM, finance uses an ERP, and operations relies on a custom built logistics database. Each department speaks a different "data language" and has a different view of the business, making true cross functional strategy nearly impossible. Now, imagine Gemini acting as a semantic bridge across all these systems. A product manager, without writing a single line of code, can ask in natural language: "Show me the correlation between the recent marketing campaign for Product X, the sales pipeline for that product in the EMEA region, and the associated supply chain costs. What is the true, all-in profitability of this product over the last quarter?"
Gemini's strength here is its ability to understand the underlying meaning (semantics) of data, regardless of where it's stored or how it's formatted. It can interpret "customer acquisition cost" from the marketing platform and "deal size" from the CRM and understand how they relate to "unit profitability" from the ERP. This capability to perform complex, cross domain joins using natural language effectively creates a virtual, unified data model without the need for a costly and time consuming data warehousing project. It democratizes data analysis, allowing any business leader to get holistic answers to critical questions.
Consider how this universal translation capability can be applied to your organization:
Identify: A critical business question that is currently difficult to answer because the necessary data lives in at least three different departmental systems (e.g., "How do our pre-sales engineering efforts impact customer lifetime value and support ticket volume?" or "What is the end to end carbon footprint of our flagship product, from raw material sourcing to final delivery?").
Conceptualize a Prompt for Gemini: "Act as our Chief Data Officer. You have access to our Salesforce CRM, our SAP ERP, and our Zendesk support platform. I want to understand the true cost of acquiring and retaining low value vs. high value customers. Correlate marketing campaign spend and sales team effort (from Salesforce) with the eventual product margin and post sale support costs (from SAP and Zendesk). Present a summary that identifies our most and least profitable customer segments and recommend one action for the marketing team and one for the support team to improve overall portfolio profitability."
We encourage your IT and business intelligence leaders to launch a "Unified View" pilot. Select a single, high impact business question and grant a Gemini powered tool read only access to the relevant, siloed data sources. Demonstrating that you can get an answer in hours, a task that might currently take a team of analysts weeks, provides a powerful argument for a new, more agile approach to enterprise intelligence. This is the first step toward running your business on a single, unified source of truth.
Gemini: Strategic Edge will provide:
Deep dives into Gemini's advanced features and their enterprise applications.
Strategic frameworks for AI adoption and transformation.
Insights on responsible AI, security, and scalability in the enterprise context.
Updates on Gemini's evolving capabilities and its role in shaping the AI landscape.
Our next issue will focus on the financial core of the enterprise. We will explore how Gemini can transform the office of the CFO, from automating financial reporting and forecasting to enhancing compliance and risk management.
To your Strategic Edge,
The Native Think Team