Summary: ABI tells you *what’s happening*. ACH tells you *why it’s happening*. One finds the mystery, the other solves the mystery.
If intelligence frameworks were people, ABI and ACH would be the kind of couple you’d never seat next to each other at a dinner party.
Activity-Based Intelligence (ABI) is the adventurous one always watching behaviors, noticing patterns, following the breadcrumbs of life across space and time. ABI is that friend who can tell you your neighbor is going on vacation just by the way he waters his plants. ABI doesn’t wait for a mystery to appear; it *hunts it down* with timestamps, logs, and enough metadata to terrify even the most seasoned privacy lawyer.
Then there’s Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) the sensible, structured analytic type. ACH loves matrices. ACH thinks feelings are fine, but where’s the evidence *against* each possible explanation? ACH won’t commit to anything without evaluating at least three alternative hypotheses and ranking them by inconsistency scores. Romantic? Not really. Useful? Absolutely.
Together, though, they make one heck of an intelligence workflow!
ABI discovers something weird say, your third-party supplier suddenly sends emails at 2 a.m. from a server that used to only talk to Switzerland on Sundays. ABI doesn’t jump to conclusions; it just raises an eyebrow and hands you a pile of suspicious activity breadcrumbs.
Then ACH steps in like a calm detective:
Okay, is this a cyberattack? A stressed employee? A misconfigured script? Or simply Monday? ACH sorts through the evidence, eliminates the nonsense, and picks the explanation with the least contradictions because in intelligence, the truth isn’t the one that feels right; it’s the one that’s *least wrong*.
And that’s the magic. Put them together and you get something even Sherlock Holmes would approve of assuming you could pry him away from the ACH matrix long enough to explain why your suppliers are suddenly behaving like they’re in a Tom Clancy novel.