Artificial intelligence (AI) research in the intensive care unit (ICU) mainly focuses on developing models (from linear regression to deep learning) to predict outcomes, such as mortality or sepsis [1, 2]. However, there is another important aspect of AI that is typically not framed as AI (although it may be more worthy of the name), which is the prediction of patient outcomes or events that would result from different actions, known as causal inference [3, 4]. This aspect of AI is crucial for decision-making in the ICU. To emphasize the importance of causal inference, we propose to refer to any data-driven model used for causal inference tasks as ‘actionable AI’, as opposed to ‘predictive AI’, and discuss how these models could provide meaningful decision support in the ICU.