Systems and methods are provided for recognition of an application in communication traffic flow in a network using an artificial intelligence (AI) based hierarchical service awareness engine. A decode equivalent class (DEC) can be used to provide information on the application. A DEC corresponds to a class of traffic that is mapped to an artificial intelligence (AI) model associated with parameters related to the class of traffic. DEC information can be fed to an AI model set and an inference model can be derived from a AI model of the AI model set corresponding to a DEC. The inference model can be provided to a gateway of the network to recognize a specific application of a service in communication flows. In various embodiments, in training the AI models, the gateway can provide DEC information for the AI model set from classifying flows of data traffic received from the network into DECs.