Data science, and more generally Artificial Intelligence (AI), differs from traditional programming and analysis in its ability to extract knowledge from data and modify its behavior and learn without specific programming. While traditional software predefines the logic that governs their processes, Data Science's algorithms build and discover models and are able to continually improve them.

Data science brings together a set of skills including Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), speech, images and faces recognition (among other applications). In some applications, the algorithms go so far as to simulate human intelligence.