Companies are investing heavily in AI without understanding what makes it work. There is no artificial intelligence applied to business without the scaffolding for domain intelligence.
Without that scaffolding, what companies call “AI” is pattern matching on data they don’t understand. The algorithms execute and produce outputs, but those outputs aren’t reliable—they’re disconnected from how the business actually functions.
Domain intelligence requires three things, built in order:
Ontology – the building blocks of common language. What exists in your domain and how those things relate.
Semantics – the language layer. How we talk about those things and what terms actually mean.
Context – situational applied meaning. How to correctly interpret any data point within the web of business relationships.
You cannot have context without semantics. You cannot have semantics without ontology. And you cannot have domain intelligence without context.
Most companies skip this scaffolding entirely. They …
