Cognos Analysis Studio is intended for business users and was designed to be an easy-to-use tool for analyzing data.
A straightforward way to identify a user that would benefit from Cognos Analysis Studio is to determine what kind of questions they will ask. If they ask questions with the word by in them, they are likely to benefit from using Cognos Analysis Studio. For instance, a typical Cognos Analysis Studio user might ask the question, "What are our sales by year?". Another more complex question they may ask could be, "What was our margin last year by territory, by product?". These questions imply the need for examining data in a multidimensional format. That is exactly what Cognos Analysis Studio was built to do. If your business users ask questions using a combination of what, when, where, and who, it's probably an analysis.