“Business intelligence (BI) is descriptive, enabling better business decisions that are based on a foundation of current business data. Business analytics (BA) is then a subset of BI, with business analytics providing the prescriptive, forward-looking analysis. It is the umbrella of BI infrastructure that includes the tools for the identification and storage of the data for decision-making.
BI might tell an organization how many new customers were acquired last month and whether order size was up or down for the month. As opposed to this, business analytics might predict which strategies, based on that data, would most benefit the organization. For example: What happens if we increase advertising spending to give new customers a special offer?”
Reference:
