Gartner claims that by 2020, the average person will have more conversations with bots than with their significant others. A startling prediction that indicates how entwined humans will become with technology. Nonetheless, businesses will need to be able to fuel those interactions, and more importantly derive value from the exchange of information using real-time analytics.

Yet, that is a capability that many enterprises currently lack. The challenges behind visualization data in real-time are many, ranging from a lack of infrastructure, to static analytics tools, to managing the flow of data. Industry thought leaders tend to agree.

“Real-time data is becoming more and more important,” says Alooma CTO Yair Weinberger. However, many are finding the prospect of deriving value from that real-time data daunting. “Building something in house based on open source tools is going to be hard,” Weinberger says. “That’s very hard to do.”

Naturally, those challenges have led to the rise of companies that provide real-time data visualization tools, such as Alooma, which recently announced Alooma Live, an offering that gives users the ability to view real-time data flows, and create visualizations around individual data streams separately. Yoni Broyde, Co-founder and CEO of Alooma says “Alooma Live makes it possible for data scientists and engineers to gain unprecedented visibility into their streams, so they can correct problems and be confident the intelligence being derived from their data is accurate, reliable and actionable.”

Of course, Broyde’s comments highlight what the company’s products are all about, Alooma’s Co-founder is on to something. Real-time analytics is becoming an important capability for businesses, especially in the retail sector.

One only has to look at e-commerce examples, such as Amazon.com, to understand how much value real-time analytics can deliver. For example, Amazon uses real-time analytics to take action based upon a shopper’s preferences and offer content that is relevant to their shopping experience. Much the same can be said for many other large web sites, such as the New York Times, which can adjust content in real-time to address user preferences.

Of course, real-time data visualization can be used for much more than powering A/I based customer interactions. For businesses that need to reach quickly to market conditions, Real-Time visualization can increase the relevance of data, illustrating the data that drives today’s customers’ decisions and what choices they will make.

Gartner goes on to predict that harnessing streaming data for real-time analytics will become more affordable and more accessible to businesses, thanks to architectural developments that can streamline the process. Architectural blueprints, such as Lambda and Kappa, will enable enterprises to achieve fast access to fresh, streaming data. Allowing data and analytics leaders to reduce cost and accelerate implementation of real-time analytics solutions.

According to Alooma’s Broyde, the company goes many steps further, easing the implementation of real-time data analytics by integrating with existing platforms. Broyde says “Our support for the Google Cloud Platform ensures that customers can integrate all their disparate data silos with the cloud provider of their choice. Our existing support for Google BigQuery, and new integration with Google Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL and Google Cloud SQL for MySQL are the latest examples of our close collaboration with Google.”