Companies can use business intelligence technologies and applications to analyze market trends, customer spending patterns and behavior, customer preferences, company capabilities, and market conditions. Analysts and managers can use business intelligence to determine the most likely adjustments to impact trends.

Companies can use BI systems to make consistent, data-based business decisions. This is more effective than making decisions based on guesswork. Business intelligence applications are also able to improve communication between departments, coordinate activities and allow companies to respond faster to changes (e.g. in financial conditions, customer preferences or supply chain operations). A BI system can improve a company’s performance if it is well-designed, integrated into its decision-making processes, and implemented properly. A company's ability to access accurate and timely information is a valuable resource that can speed up decision-making and improve customer experience.

Software tools have been developed by business intelligence analysts to analyze large amounts of unstructured data such as attendance reports, production metrics, sales statistics, customer attrition figures, and attendance reports. Each BI vendor develops Business Intelligence systems in a different way to meet the needs of different industries (e.g. retail, financial service companies, etc.). ).

Businesses began automating increasingly more of their systems and became more data-rich. The lack of infrastructure to exchange data or incompatibilities among systems made collection difficult. Analysing the data was difficult and sometimes reports took several months to produce. These reports enabled informed strategic decision-making over the long-term. Short-term tactical decisions were still made based on intuition.

Different strategies are required to achieve business intelligence. Application software can help with the BI task. Software that allows a computer's functions to be governed by the user's wishes is called application software. Although application software differs from system software, it integrates various capabilities of the computer. However, these capabilities are not directly used to the user's benefit. Application software is intended to assist people in making prudent decisions by providing them with accurate, current and relevant information. Business intelligence, also known as Decision-support system or DSS, is precisely this reason.