Business intelligence functions support a wide variety of business areas such as finance, marketing, product and human resources with critical business insights. 

Here are a few sample applications:

1.  Finance: Within finance, a business intelligence function may develop and own the lifetime value (LTV) work stream. This involves sourcing data inputs to construct the LTV data tables, building the LTV dashboards and distributing reports around LTV updates such as changes to LTV in specific countries. Business intelligence may also take on a regulatory reporting role, setting up the systems to produce company reports and financial statements.
2. Marketing: Supporting marketing, a BI function may build and maintain ongoing reports on total addressable market (TAM) by customer segment. Knowing TAM involves sourcing data on customer numbers, competitive customer numbers, industry specific data to know total possible customers (such as web users for internet-based products). After data sourcing, BI teams deliver insights to marketing teams on a regular basis to develop a data-driven marketting strategy.
3. Product: In the product space, a business intelligence function may own a number of projects, one of which may be maintaining accurate customer numbers by product feature. This would include basic customer segmentation, such as noting volumes of customers (based on whether they are daily, weekly or monthly users) or whether the numbers represent repeat or net new customers. This kind of data collection involves sourcing and quality checking data on customer numbers and visualizing the information for business leaders.
4. Human Resources: In the human resource space, a BI function may take on the role of regular reporting to senior leadership on critical staffing metrics such as turnover, hiring trends and overall company size and growth. There may also be a regulatory component to business intelligence work in the human resources space where the function needs to produce consistent reports on salaries by demographic.