Business intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) comprises the strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data analysis of business information. BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations.

So business intelligence is about descriptive analytics (or looking at what happened), slicing-and-dicing across dimensional models with massive dissemination to all business users. Lot's of people think that business intelligence is the same as Artificial Intelligence, but this isn't the case. BI is the world of descriptive analysis. Those are analyzes that offer a rear mirror view about the company report and about what has happened or what is currently happening. Artificial Intelligence is future-oriented: providing future-oriented insights and actions about the company. AI is predicting what is likely to happen (usually associated with a probability), why it is likely to happen and what you can do best to achieve the optimal scenario.

Both of the intelligence is very useful for an organization. With BI you can learn from the past and with AI you can anticipate in the future.