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Decision Intelligence

Aminu Abdullahi
Last Updated May 25, 2022 6:38 am

Decision intelligence combines business intelligence (BI) and artificial intelligence (AI) models to improve organizations’ decision-making processes. Learn more about how decision intelligence works and why it’s valuable below.

What Is Decision Intelligence?

Decision intelligence combines BI and AI models to make organizations’ decision-making processes faster, easier, and more consistent and accurate. In addition, decision intelligence can provide insights that support the identification of business opportunities, strategy and plan development, project launches, and predicted outcomes.

These insights help transform business processes that create more efficient workflows and lead to more accurate forecasts, cost reductions, boosted profitability, improved customer service, and increased productivity.


Portions of this definition originally appeared on CIO Insight and are excerpted here with permission.

What Are the Benefits of Decision Intelligence?

Decision intelligence processes can improve outcomes for an individual, an organization, and customers. Some of the top benefits of decision intelligence include:

Better decision quality and speed

With business intelligence, users can make faster, more accurate decisions based on readily available complex data; there’s no need for lengthy research or meetings with multiple stakeholders.

Improved accuracy

Decision intelligence tools allow users to eliminate many trial-and-error processes, providing them with more time to focus on greater opportunities.

Bias recognition

Decision intelligence can help users recognize biases in decision-making, which can reduce major mistakes that result from unknown prejudices.


Learn more about decision intelligence on CIO Insight.

How Can Decision Intelligence Be Used?

Decision intelligence provides a systematic approach to the decision-making process, which can be useful in many industries such as:

  • Talent management: Recruiters can use decision intelligence software to analyze candidate data and make recommendations based on best practices and past successes, allowing them to choose a candidate that is a good organizational fit.
  • Marketing: With decision intelligence software, marketers can identify high-performing campaigns to maximize return on investment (ROI).
  • Sales: Decision intelligence tools can offer real-time insights on customer preferences that can be used to tailor messages, increase conversion rates, and boost revenue.
  • Retail store management: Retailers can meet customers’ needs, while maximizing profit margins, by using decision intelligence tools to make informed decisions regarding pricing strategies and inventory levels.

How Are Decision Intelligence and Business Intelligence Different?

Despite their similarities, decision intelligence and business intelligence have a few key differences that set them apart. For example, while they both rely on statistical analysis techniques, BI uses these techniques to identify patterns in historical datasets, whereas decision intelligence uses statistical analysis to predict future trends in current datasets.

But the most important difference is that BI solutions tend to be more descriptive, offering insights on what happened based on past data, and decision intelligence solutions tend to be more prescriptive by offering insights for the future based on current data. Decision intelligence enables business leaders to be more proactive on a variety of decisions.

Read next: Top 10 Business Intelligence (BI) Tool Recommendations