Competitive intelligence (CI) is the process and forward-looking practices used in producing knowledge about the competitive environment to improve organizational performance. Competitive intelligence involves systematically collecting and analysing information from multiple sources as part of a coordinated competitive intelligence program. It is the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, suppliers, competitors, and any aspect of the external business environment needed to support executives and managers in strategic decision making for an organization.

CI involves developing an understanding of what is happening in the world outside the business, so as to increase one's competitiveness. It means learning as much as possible, as soon as possible, about one's external environment including one's industry in general and relevant competitors. This methodical program affects the organization's tactics, decisions and operations.

Another definition of competitive intelligence regards it as the organizational function responsible for the early identification of risks and opportunities in the market before they become obvious ("early signal analysis"). This definition focuses attention on the difference between the dissemination of widely available factual information (such as from market research reports, financial reports, newspaper clippings) performed by functions such as libraries and information centers, and competitive intelligence which is a perspective on developments and events aimed at yielding a competitive edge.

The term competitive intelligence is sometimes viewed as synonymous with competitor analysis, but competitive intelligence is more than analyzing competitors; it embraces the entire business environment and stakeholders: customers, competitors, distributors, technologies, and macroeconomic data. It is also a tool for decision-making.

Commercial Intelligence can be obtained and analyzed in various ways that include:

On the other hand, business intelligence is a misnomer for data mining and enterprise dashboards that present useful patterns or distillations of internal information to the executives.

Competitive intelligence literature can be exemplified by the bibliographies that were published in the Strategic Consortium of Intelligence Professionals' now discontinued academic journal The Journal of Competitive Intelligence and Management. Although elements of organizational intelligence collection have been a part of business for at least a century, the history of competitive intelligence as a discrete topic began in the U.S. in the 1970s, although the literature on the field pre-dates this time by at least several decades.

In 1980, Michael Porter published the study Competitive-Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors which is viewed as the foundation of modern competitive intelligence. This has since been extended most notably by Craig Fleisher and Babette Bensoussan, who through several popular books on competitive analysis described 48 competitive intelligence analysis techniques to the practitioner's tool box.