Business intelligence (BI) refers to skills, technologies, applications and practices used to help a business acquire a better understanding of its commercial context. Business intelligence may also refer to the collected information itself.

BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, OLAP, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, and predictive analytics.

Business intelligence often aims to support better business decision-making. Thus a BI system can be called a decision support system (DSS).

In a 1958 article, IBM researcher Hans Peter Luhn used the term business intelligence. He defined intelligence as: "the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal."

In 1989 Howard Dresner (later a Gartner Group analyst) proposed BI as an umbrella term to describe "concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems." It was not until the late 1990s that this usage was widespread.  Business intelligence and data warehousing

Often BI applications use data gathered from a data warehouse or a data mart. However, not all data warehouses are used for business intelligence nor do all business intelligence applications require a data warehouse.

Business intelligence refers to the use of company data to facilitate decision-making by decision-makers, which means understanding current functioning and anticipating actions for well-informed steering of the enterprise.

Intelligence tools are based on the use of an intelligence information system which is supplied with different data extracted from production data, information concerning the company or its environment and economic data. Data warehouses or Data marts are used in the process of extracting data for decision-makers.

A tool called ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) is therefore responsible for extracting data from different sources, cleaning them up and loading them into a data warehouse.

Finally, analytic intelligence tools make it possible to model the representations on the basis of queries to create border tables, this is called reporting.

The term business intelligence is often used as a synonym for competitive intelligence.