How Zenlytic Invented Proactive Analytics (Accidentally at First)
We built wildly smart analytics agents, named them horribly, and kept building anyway. While we debated buzzwords, they caught issues weeks before we could. Turns out the industry had a name ready for us: Proactive Analytics
At Zenlytic, we’ve built a team of the world’s most cracked engineers, designers, and PMs. Innovating on the red bleeding edge of analytics agents.
But you know what we’re not good at?
Naming things.
So when we built the world’s first proactive analytics agent last year, we had no idea what to call it. Is it a Task? A Workflow? An Automation? At one point, and we kid you not here: ‘automagics’ was written on a whiteboard.
We chose ✨Intelligent Workflows✨, then went back to what we do best: building.
Today, ✨Intelligent Workflows✨..now known as Proactive Analytics agents, are quietly monitoring customer health, product issues, marketing opportunities, and many more for thousands of users per day.
At the time, we knew ‘Workflows’ was underselling the potential. These were intelligent agents, working 24 hours a day, using PhD level intelligence to decide if there was something important you should know about.
But “Workflows” got even sillier as we made them more powerful: adding multi-step analytics, dynamic inputs, file uploads, agent customization.
We use them extensively ourselves: Petë, our friendly customer success agent, is constantly watching for hundreds of signs that our customers may be struggling and assessing when it’s time to speak with our CS team. Petë has flagged stuck customers up to 3 weeks faster than we humans could notice.
While we were doing all this building, it turns out the industry aligned around a buzzword for this concept: Proactive Analytics.
So today, we’re pleased to launch PROACTIVE ANALYTICS! Is it just a name change? Sort of. But it also encompasses more than a year of powerful new features, customer feedback, and iteration on the product since it was just boring old Workflows.
If you’d like to see our Proactive Analytics in action, just reach out. Our Proactive agents are getting smarter every week (but the name won’t be changing again any time soon).
