In the near future, simply having predictive models that suggest what might be done won’t be enough to stay ahead of the competition. Instead, smart organizations are driving analytics to an even deeper level within business processes—to make real-time operational decisions, on a daily basis. These operational analytics are embedded, prescriptive, automated, and run at scale to directly drive business decisions. They not only predict what the next best action is, but also cause the action to happen without human intervention. That may sound radical at first, but it really isn’t. In fact, it is simply allowing analytics to follow the same evolution that manufacturing went through during the industrial revolution.