Book Image

AI and Business Rule Engines for Excel Power Users

By : Paul Browne (GBP), PORCELLI
Book Image

AI and Business Rule Engines for Excel Power Users

By: Paul Browne (GBP), PORCELLI

Overview of this book

Microsoft Excel is widely adopted across diverse industries, but Excel Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets. They need a better enterprise-level solution, and this book introduces Business rules combined with the power of AI to tackle the limitations of Excel. This guide will give you a roadmap to link KIE (an industry-standard open-source application) to Microsoft’s business process automation tools, such as Power Automate, Power Query, Office Script, Forms, VBA, Script Lab, and GitHub. You’ll dive into the graphical Decision Modeling standard including decision tables, FEEL expressions, and advanced business rule editing and testing. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to share your business knowledge as graphical models, deploy and execute these models in the cloud (with Azure and OpenShift), link them back to Excel, and then execute them as an end-to-end solution removing human intervention. You’ll be equipped to solve your Excel queries and start using the next generation of Microsoft Office tools.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1:The Problem with Excel, and Why Rule-Based AI Can Be the Solution
5
Part 2: Writing Business Rules and Decision Models – with Real-Life Examples
9
Part 3: Extending Excel, Decision Models, and Business Process Automation into a Complete Enterprise Solution
13
Part 4: Next Steps in AI, Machine Learning, and Rule Engines
Appendix A - Introduction to Visual Basic for Applications

Ethics and explainability in decision making – how KIE helps

We touched on ethics in Chapter 5 when we talked about the importance of being respectful of customer data. While it made good business sense, our approach was also driven by the European GDPR legislation, which has a worldwide impact even if you don’t live in the region.

The EU is proposing similar legislation for AI that is expected to have an equally wide impact. Like the GDPR, its focus is on things that also make good business sense. And since you’re reading a book on business rules and KIE, you’re better prepared than most people for when it comes into operation. There are many reasons, but we’ll focus on two – why AI rules are explainable by default, and how KIE shines a light to explain more on the decisions made by neural networks.

Business rules are explainable by default

One of the things that attracted us to the business rule approach to AI is that rules are explainable...