Kicking Analysts Out of the Meeting Room: Supporting Future Data-driven Decision Making with Intelligent Interactive Visualization Systems

Today's data-driven decisions are largely dependent on professional analysts conducting analysis and generating visualizations for decision makers. These middlemen between data and decision makers may induce cost and trust issues in the generated visualizations. To overcome these issues, I envision a future scenario where intelligent interactive visualization systems may replace analysts in the decision-making process when the analyses and visualizations are relatively simple. However, three gaps need to be addressed before the future scenario could be realized. In this paper, I will discuss these gaps, propose potential solutions, and hope to raise a discussion on the future role of visualization systems for data-driven decision-making.