Data mining is actually one of the newer methods that market research companies are employing, but it serves as a foundation for both artificial intelligence and machine learning. Data mining, as a practice, is more than just culling supersets of information from various sources. Data mining can cull and then aggregate information to alert you to patterns and correlations that you hadn’t even thought of.
That means that data mining isn’t as much a method to prove a hypothesis as it is a method for framing various hypotheses. Data mining can find the answers to questions that you hadn’t thought to ask yet. What are the patterns? Which statistics are the most surprising? What is the correlation between A and B?
That mined data (and the accompanying patterns and hypotheses) can then be used as the basis for both artificial intelligence and machine learning.