So, a data scientist’s tasks or job function, whatever you want to call it, may seem similar to performing basic business intelligence (BI), but I think there are some apparent distinctions. BI is intended for analyzing specific data using specific strategies and technologies to offer past, present, and predictive views of a business’s daily operations.
BI uses structured information, and it falls more under this solidly in the domain of analytics, and it uses a lot of visualization tools and dashboard reports that are built on more standard statistics. It analyzes current information to pinpoint trends.
If you look at data science, it uses both scripted and unstructured data and is based more on science and mathematics, using various forms of sophisticated statistical and predictive analysis. You can think about machine learning or AI, of course, which combines both past and current data to arrive at these future predictions.