What are the 4 types of AI?
A practical way to think about AI in business: descriptive (what happened), predictive (what might happen), prescriptive (what should we do), and generative (create something new).
Academic frameworks often describe four AI types as reactive, limited memory, theory of mind, and self-aware. These are useful for research but rarely helpful for business decisions.
The more useful framing for applied work is by function. Descriptive AI analyzes and summarizes past events (dashboards, anomaly detection, audit trails). Predictive AI forecasts future outcomes (churn prediction, demand forecasting, risk scoring). Prescriptive AI recommends actions (dynamic pricing, routing optimization, next-best-action). Generative AI creates new content (text, images, code, synthetic data).
Most real-world AI projects combine two or three of these. A good consultant picks the right mix for the problem rather than fixating on one category.
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