Learn a practical, collaborative method for understanding complex decisions and choosing actions that lead to better outcomes.
Use it on its own—or connect it with data, analytics, and AI when they add value.
Is Decision Intelligence for you?
Do you make or support high-stakes decisions in complex environments, where outcomes are hard to predict or measure?
Are you under pressure to get real value from AI, data, and analytics, not just build more technology?
Do you see a growing disconnect between technology and business outcomes?
Are you a data, AI, business, policy, or consulting professional looking to differentiate your career by working on decisions that actually matter?
Do you believe solutions should start with decisions, users, and use cases — not tools?
If you answered “yes” to any of these, Decision Intelligence may be for you.
Decision Intelligence is a discipline for mapping how decisions lead to outcomes, aligning people, data, and models around what actually drives results.
It’s not just for technologists — and it doesn’t require AI — but it provides a clear bridge to simulation and AI when they make sense.
Live 8-week cohort beginning around mid-October 2026 Approximately 2 hours per week—or 3 hours with the certification homework $2,998 USD · 30-day money-back guarantee
I believe this is groundbreaking material and has the potential of changing the way businesses approach decision making. [One use case we’re focusing on] is to enhance our precision in making informed decisions to improve client relationships and return on strategies.
The Getting Started with Decision Intelligence course gives you a “DI practice in a box”. A step-by-step, hands-on method that has been proven in hundreds of organizations worldwide.
The class was life-changing. Learning how to facilitate the creation of CDDs and connect them with data opens up a whole new way to think about AI and how to create a shared vision for collective intelligence- connecting human and machine learning. Most of the current thinking about gen AI is like thinking of a pencil as a tool to point at things. Now a whole new world of thinking about problem solving and optimizing processes has opened up. The power of the CDD as a way to share a mental model and allow for multiple outcomes in problem-solving in groups is a powerful way to come to consensus and dramatically augment both individual and collective intelligence.
Silicon Valley Inventor, Entrepreneur, and discoverer of the Mother of All Demos
Based on this course, I’m actively working on a lucrative DI project. During the course, I was blown away by the team’s enthusiasm and practical knowledge around their synthesis: “Action to Outcomes” from of many years of experience and combination of multiple academic and practical disciplines spanning over 5 decades. DI is the future, no question about it.
The weekly minimum commitment for this course is two (2) hours – one offline and one live – plus an additional 3rd hour for homework if you wish to receive recognition as a Certified DI Analyst.
GSWDI students with high assessment scores earn the Certified DI Analyst credential
The next cohort of Getting Started with Decision Intelligence will start around mid-October, 2026, and will run for 8 weeks at the same time each week.
The attribute of DI that has stuck out to me as most valuable is its focus on alignment. I think this arises naturally out of the agreement to create and use a concrete decision artifact. CDDs (and DI in general) align decision makers around agreed-upon outcomes and levers. It’s common for decisionmakers in all organizations to struggle with this.
Isaac Kellogg
OpenDI.org
Earn one of three certifications, including shareable online badges:
“More than 33% of large organizations will have analysts practicing decision intelligence“
The Gartner Group
30-day money-back guarantee
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
Structure decision conversations around desired outcomes (financial and / or non-financial) and actions to achieve them.
Understand how a good decision in one part of your organization can create problems for others (the “whack-a-mole” effect between silos), and how to fix this.
Understand what to do when institutional knowledge from experienced professionals is partially or wholly no longer relevant because your situation has changed, and what to do about it.
Understand how to combine human creativity and human intuition with the power of AI and data.
Find simplicity and order amongst the confusion of complex decisions
Use state-of-the-art collaborative tools to map AI, knowledge, data, and more into decisions.
Provide massive improvement in ROI to your data management projects by guiding them towards the 10% of data that has 90% of the value.
Identify integrations between organizational silos.
Earn greater trust and credibility for your team.
Learn how AI and DI work together to provide massive value (DI overcomes AI hallucination; AI gives DI a natural-language interface)
Use AI as an advisor to decision making
Learn how AI can help to find decision elements
Discover DI prompt engineering’s value for AI
Learn how decision models connect AI deployments to business value
DI provides deterministic reasoning elements in the path from actions to outcomes
Agentic AI goes beyond text to taking actions in the non-digital world
Learn how decision intelligence is applied causal reasoning
Learn how decision intelligence is the “killer app” for agentic AI
I think the concepts discussed in the course were very well explored. A lot of time is often spent at the outset of data projects trying to poke holes in ideas and changes so that we don’t have to worry about them in the future, but with DI we can both have a higher amount of trust in the decisions we make from the outset and also have higher confidence that when something does inevitably go awry, that we can fix it in a sensible and minimally painful way.
Enrollment is now open. Apply The next cohort of Getting Started with Decision Intelligence will start around mid-October, 2026, and will run for 8 weeks at the same time each week.
Decision intelligence is the discipline of turning information into better actions at any scale.
Dr. Cassie Kozyrkov Former Chief Decision Scientist, Google Cloud
In praise of Link: How Decision Intelligence Connects Data, Actions, and Outcomes, for a Better World, Cerf writes: “[Decision Intelligence]is an exercise in abstraction, causality, and modeling. It is about discovering and making visible interdependencies in complex systems. [Pratt] distills what she has learned in pithy insights. “
*Learn how to combine the best of human knowledge and creativity with the most advanced AI (GenAI and AgenticAI) to solve the hardest problems, in live sessions every week
There are so many businesses who sell access to proprietary information and data sets. I think there’s a great opportunity for these firms to use DI to build on top of those assets by providing tools to allow users to model decisions, perhaps with templated CDDs becoming a valuable class of IP in their own right.
Week 1: Introduction to the course, DI, and where GenAI and Agentic AI fit in
Part B: Hands-on decision mapping and modeling: best practices, classic mistakes
Week 2: Outcomes
Week 3: Levers, Choices, and Actions
Week 4: Intermediates and Dependencies
Week 5: LLMs, Externals and Augmentation Part 1: Connecting analytics, data, machine learning, and other assets to decisions
Week 6: LLMs, Externals and Augmentation Part 2: Connecting analytics, data, machine learning, assumptions, constraints, and other assets to decisions
Part C: What’s next
Week 7: The business case for decision intelligence
Week 8: DI in your organization: what problems does it solve, how can you introduce DI effectively, and how do you know if a problem is a good fit for DI? How can you overcome organizational barriers?
Weekly video presentation plus live hands-on training, Q&A, and informal coffee hour
A unique opportunity to work alongside the inventor of the field of decision intelligence: Dr. Lorien Pratt and the coauthor of the Decision Intelligence Handbook, N. E. Malcolm
Self-study quizzes for every lesson
Weekly carefully and personally graded homework assignments
Access to your classmates for support and inspiration: leaders in DI worldwide
Access to the online DI video library, including DI success case studies
The chance to influence the future of DI by working with inventors of the discipline.
An hour of 1:1 consulting time with Dr. Pratt and/or her team
Certificate / online badges
Actionable intelligence is often overlooked, yet of course it’s the core of what we need from the data and AI stack. This course is one of the few resources available today that teaches even non-technical personnel how to connect these breakthrough technical resources to the outcomes they desire. And causal decision diagrams (CDDs) are the lynchpin: understandable by technical and nontechnical personnel alike, they’re getting more impact and attention on how we are doing decision making. Through CDDs and BIM and thus focus on outcomes, decisions and the need for information, managers and business specialists can stay longer in prioritizing and setting requirements for different solutions.
Johan Lindholm
Data Governance Strategist & Information Architect at Göteborg Energi
All in all, there is a lot I loved about the whole GSWDI course: the incredibly inspirational guest speakers, coffee hour discussions, and also the fact that we got to watch the videos before class, allowing class to be used for questions and really insightful discussions. In addition, having access to recordings of previous years provided additional interesting questions and discussions to explore. I would love to learn more and find a way to do additional work in DI. I really like the overall approach and I can see it bringing huge value to organisations by making decisions visible and transparent and inviting more diverse views, helping to think through causal chains between actions, intermediates and outcomes with goals and in particular unintended consequences, separating out externals and working out the right level, e.g., individual or policy level.
Connie
Former Student
Who is this course for?
Leaders (especially analytics department leaders and Enterprise Architects) and Facilitators making or supporting complex decisions
GenAI, AgenticAI, NeuroSymbolic AI, ML, Data science and data analyst practitioners (current and aspiring)
Decision Intelligence Service Providers (DISP) vendors and consultants (current and aspiring)
I’m ready to invest in my decision intelligence skill set, to achieve the best outcomes possible from decisions and actions, and to make a massive difference in my career by helping to align people with decisions, and decisions with technology.
After taking GSWDI, I believe in DI so much that I’ve founded a DI company based on its principles: evahelp.me. Why: DI enhances the speed, cost-efficiency, and quality of data science and analytics projects, addressing common challenges such as miscommunication between data scientists and decision-makers, and inefficiencies in data analysis. By integrating decision models and simulations, DI allows Eva AI to analyze profit curves, determine optimal pricing and production levels, and align financial strategies with strategic goals. By mapping out sales and outcomes, understanding how many users are needed to be profitable, and eliminating unnecessary data wrangling, DI empowers Eva AI to achieve operational outcomes and make informed, risk-managed decisions.
“Lorien is among the smartest, hardest-working people I have ever had the pleasure to work with. Her incredibly deep technical knowledge is exceeded by her ability to communicate highly complex concepts clearly — and to tie them back to clients’ tactical and strategic challenges. Her pioneering work in machine learning and decision intelligence provides immense value to Quantellia’s clients and multiplies their ability to add value for their own customers.”
I know that I have a 30-day money back guarantee: I will have full access to all course materials, and if I am not fully satisfied within 30 days of payment, I can request my payment back in full.
Lorien is a powerful thinker able to bring quantification to concepts that grow our understanding of complex systems …[she] cuts through the muddle and identifies the stepping stones for progress. She can really listen, ask pertinent and incisive questions and then reflect back what you said so that you understand what you described better than you did before the conversation began.
The process of creating CDDs keeps the focus on the “big picture” while also forcing considering of externals and 2nd/3rd/etc. derivative implications of actions. The approach covered in the course has helped me think about using the techniques to supplement other discovery and design processes. I think it can be tactfully “snapped on” to other, more common practices. The ability to use CDDs as blueprints for digital twins is a key differentiator from those other “snap on” processes.
Decision Intelligence (DI) is the emerging practice that democratizes access to … cutting-edge technologies, and enables more and more businesses to benefit from the power of AI. Lorien and her team are … unparalleled in their position to deliver the DI solutions that will fundamentally change how AI is used to make better decisions.
David L. Roberts
Cofounder, OpenDI.org and Professor of Computer Science, NCSU
The next cohort of Getting Started with Decision Intelligence will start around mid-October, 2026, and will run for 8 weeks at the same time each week. The minimum time commitment is two (2) hours per week.
I know that I have a 30-day money back guarantee: I will have full access to all course materials, and if I am not fully satisfied within 30 days of payment, I can request my payment back in full.
I am a firm believer in DI and 100% think this is the next big thing in tech and leadership. Indeed, I have recently invested some of my time in opendi.org in order to move this important field forward. I look forward to continuing to work together and help the world see how valuable DI is and how we can help make the world a better place through transparent and comprehensive DI. By combining advanced algorithms, massive datasets, and computational power, DI enhances human analysis and intuition. DI systems can rapidly process and analyze data, accelerating the ability to detect patterns and changes in our environment.
Jim Eselgroth
Director, Innovation and Technology, Highlight
The next cohort of Getting Started with Decision Intelligence will start around mid-October, 2026, and will run for 8 weeks at the same time each week.
The value of DI is: – At the VP / Board level – Decompose complex decisions to ensure that actions are leading to the desired outcomes, – At the middle management level – Spread outcome based decision making best practices, – At the operational level – Identify high frequency, high impact decisions, Model and maximize the performance of these decisions, – At the company level- Focus the efforts of the data quality program on data that supports key decisions.
A former college professor and co-inventor of the field of Decision Intelligence, your instructor Dr. Pratt is Quantellia chief scientist; she leads the delivery of DI and ML projects worldwide
Learning to Learn
The first book on Transfer Learning, an important Machine Learning practice that underlies modern GenAI.
The Decision Intelligence Handbook
A practical how-to manual for how to do decision intelligence.
Link
The first book on DI. Written for a trade audience, understandable by everyone
Dr. Bernadette Howlett
A former university provost and vice president of academic affairs, and winner of two national awards for AI innovation, your supporting instructor Dr. Bernadette Howlett combines executive leadership experience with expertise in AI, analytics, and adult learning, bringing practical insight into turning evidence into better organizational decisions.
Evidence-Based Practice for Health Professionals
Now in its second edition, this practical textbook equips health professionals to critically evaluate research, weigh evidence, and make informed decisions, with clinical case studies connecting principles to practice.
Decision intelligence (DI) has been a cornerstone of how I navigate complex decisions, investment strategies, and dynamic scenarios. Dr. Pratt delivers research and experiences where Decision Intelligence serves to advance a new generation of executive leadership for decades.
PS I hope you can join us for this important and career-changing class (especially now that ChatGPT and Agentic AI are part of the curriculum). You’ll find a great community of like-minded colleagues, looking to take their organizations and careers to the next level. Looking forward to working with you!
