Unifying Analysis Through the Power of Analytics Agents: Work Innovation and Role Transformation in the Generative AI Era at a Professional Organization (opens in new tab)
PJ One Piece is LY Corporation’s initiative to connect business questions, data analysis, insight generation, and next-action planning through generative AI. Its analysis agent reduced typical turnaround times from about two weeks to roughly 10 minutes, enabling hundreds of analyses each month and adoption by more than half of an early-adopter business unit. The project treats AI not as a chat interface, but as an analysis platform that connects data, knowledge, people, and organizational processes. ## Three Disconnects Behind the Project - **Business and data:** Even with a data warehouse and BI tools, business users still needed to understand SQL, tables, column definitions, KPI rules, and result interpretation. - **Within the analysis process:** Task definition, analysis design, execution, review, and action planning were often handled by different people or tools, causing context loss, rework, delays, and inconsistent quality. - **Across domains:** Useful analysis patterns and domain knowledge remained isolated because services used different KPIs, table structures, business assumptions, and review criteria. ## The Analysis Agent as a Connector - Users ask questions in natural language without needing to know SQL or database structures. - The agent: - Clarifies the business objective and missing assumptions. - Finds relevant data and creates an analysis plan. - Executes queries and specialized analyses. - Interprets results and produces visualizations or reports. - Suggests further analysis and possible next actions. - The platform consists of: - A user-facing application. - An LLM-based agent for reasoning and tool use. - Tools for SQL, Python, document search, and visualization. - A knowledge base containing domain information, skills, and table metadata. - Logging, feedback, monitoring, and evaluation systems. - Domain knowledge is added through a plugin-like structure, while logs and feedback continuously improve the system. ## Turning Business Questions into Analysis Requirements - Natural-language questions often leave important assumptions unspecified, such as: - Target population or campaign definition. - Analysis period and comparison group. - KPI definitions. - Aggregation level. - Exclusion conditions. - Rather than requiring users to write detailed prompts, the agent uses domain knowledge to determine what can be inferred and asks only about unresolved points. - Knowledge bases document service context, KPI definitions, aggregation cautions, policy information, and review requirements. - Table metadata explains available tables, columns, appropriate use cases, samples, partition requirements, and usage restrictions. ## Reaching Data Safely and Reliably - Table metadata is revealed progressively: - The agent first narrows down relevant tables. - It then retrieves detailed definitions and usage rules only for those tables. - Analysis-oriented wide tables or logical views combine transaction data with commonly needed attributes, reducing complicated joins and SQL-generation errors. - SQL is checked before and after execution to enforce: - `SELECT`-only access. - Approved tables and usage rules. - Required partition conditions. - Restrictions on sensitive or personal data. - Result-size limits. - These guardrails allow the agent to perform analysis flexibly without exposing data or infrastructure to unnecessary risks. ## Preserving Context Across the Analysis Process - PJ One Piece uses a supervisor-style multi-agent architecture. - A main agent maintains: - The user’s request and business objective. - The current analysis plan. - Findings and constraints discovered so far. - Remaining questions and decision points. - Specialized sub-agents handle tasks such as statistical testing, time-series analysis, clustering, and independent review. - This separates complex or specialized work from the main context while preserving overall continuity. - Progress updates expose discoveries, design decisions, data limitations, and constraints so users can adjust direction during longer analyses. ## Building Reusable Organizational Capability - Logs record agent actions, assumption checks, analysis designs, generated SQL, errors, and outputs. - User and analyst feedback helps identify whether improvements are needed in prompts, tools, data, or reusable skills. - Repeated workflows are formalized as skills, including: - General-purpose methods such as time-series and clustering analysis. - Domain-specific workflows such as monthly reporting or policy monitoring. - Skills document required assumptions, comparison axes, cautions, and interpretation methods. - Over time, isolated domain knowledge becomes reusable organizational analysis capability. ## Business Impact - In early deployment, the platform expanded data use beyond data scientists to product owners and frontline employees. - More than half of the participating business unit’s members use it. - Analysis turnaround fell from an average of approximately two weeks to about 10 minutes. - The platform now supports hundreds of analyses per month and serves as a daily starting point for business questions. PJ One Piece’s main recommendation is to design AI analysis as an end-to-end operating platform—not merely an automated SQL or chatbot tool. Combining structured domain knowledge, safe data access, contextual multi-agent workflows, reusable skills, and continuous evaluation can make analysis faster while steadily improving its quality and organizational reach.
