Intent Inference
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Intent inference is determining why an action was taken rather than recording what was clicked. It is what allows two people who reach the same outcome through different tools and in a different order to be recognized as doing the same work.
What Intent Inference actually means
A recording of activity is a sequence of events: an application opened, a field filled, a record saved. Read literally, two people performing the same task in different orders produce two unrelated sequences, and a hundred people produce a hundred. Literal recording therefore does not generalize, which is why screen-capture approaches produce a library of traces rather than a model of a process.
Intent inference is the step that turns activity into meaning. It asks what the action was for, and resolves the answer against business outcomes rather than against interface events. Once the purpose is known, the surface differences stop mattering: the same reconciliation performed in two tools, in two orders, is one process with two variants rather than two processes.
That generalization is what makes discovery useful at enterprise scale. Without it, more observation produces more disconnected detail and no clearer picture, and there is no path from what was seen to what should be automated. With it, patterns resolve into processes, variants can be compared on outcome, and the work becomes something that can be reasoned about rather than only replayed.
The distinction also matters for what is not collected. Inferring purpose towards a business outcome is a different exercise from logging keystrokes, and it is the reason work can be modelled without recording individual activity for its own sake. What is being captured is the shape of the work, not a transcript of a person day.
Examples
Same intent, different surface
One person reconciles in the ERP, another exports to a spreadsheet and reconciles there. The event sequences share almost nothing. Inferred against purpose, both are the same reconciliation step and become variants of one process.
Order that does not matter
Two handlers run the same three checks in different orders. Treated literally that is two workflows. Treated by intent it is one workflow whose checks are order-independent, which is a fact worth knowing before automating it.
Distinguishing similar actions
Opening a customer record to answer a question and opening it to correct an error look nearly identical as events. What separates them is what happened next and what outcome it served, which is what inference resolves.
Frequently asked questions
Related terms
Work Ontology
A work ontology is a living, continuously updating graph of how an enterprise actually operates, built by observing work at the point of execution. Its nodes are the actors, activities, and artifacts of work, and its edges are the handoffs between them, with intent inferred for every action.
Task Mining
Task mining records how individuals perform work at the desktop, capturing the steps that system logs miss. It runs for a fixed observation window and then stops, so the picture it produces is accurate on delivery and degrades from then on.
Context Graph
A context graph captures how work happened and why decisions were made along the way, rather than only the outcome a system recorded. It preserves the coordination, precedent, and evidence that made a decision make sense.
