If one uses the definition of analogy as a criterion, then obviously yes the two are analogous. They are unlike, and thus not identical, but can be compared because they have features in common. Most obvious is that both are understood as teleological but in different ways. It bears mentioning that you might want to peruse the article in the SEP: Teleological Notions in Biology. There's a big difference between the lungs having the "goal" of exchanging gasses through a biphasic interface of gas and liquid, and a student having the "goal" of graduating high school. It would be very easy to fall into a fallacy of equivocation, so beware.
Let's grant the traditional views of biological life and intelligence because it can get to be a sticky-wicket if we equivocate on terms, esp. intelligence. A thermostat can be called an intelligent device, but using these terms to describe artificial systems of computation requires caveats we needn't deal with here. Also, be careful of the fallacy of black and white thinking. Things needn't be intelligent or not. That's either-or thinking. Rather, to what degree is something alive or thinking is much more sophisticated and saves a lot of useless metaphysical pedantry.
Now, the short answer is that life is viewed as teleological generally without awareness, but awareness in a system grants it the descriptor intelligence. Metacognition would be teleological too, but with the added quality of self-awareness.
Think of it this way. A cell has a host of homeostatic requirements regarding pH and salinity and metabolic processes. A cell is clearly alive, and we can say it senses it's environment, but to consider this intelligence is the narrow, physically-oriented sense of deterministic causality. For instance, a simple one-celled organism doesn't cogitate like a bonobo about bananas and sex; rather, it's like a simple machine that senses and detects and we can trace the causality through the system.
The teleology of an organism like a dog is much more sophisticated because a dog can learn in the classical sense that psychological learning theory demonstrates. It has a sophisticated body composed of tissues and systems such as the nervous and endocrine systems which lead to non-deterministic behavior, which can be understood statistically, but not so much at a physical level, but rather at a biological level. How we group our concepts of 'things' is what ontology is all about, and so to contemplate metabolic cycles and observable canine behavior are built on two different primitive classes of ontological primitives. A biochemical compound comports with atomic theory, and a dog's body comports with evolutionary theory, and a dog's behavior comports with psychological theory, roughly.
So, both life and intelligence are systems that can be viewed through the lens of analogy, but like all analogy, it depends on how much you want to abstract. Let's list some examples of analogous features:
Both life and intelligence:
- obey naturalism; neither are supernatural
- conform to the theories of physics, chemistry, and biology
- can exhibit complexities not found in mere particles, atoms, and molecules; have emergent properties
- both are negentropic and obey thermodynamics
- both can take inputs, give outputs, change themselves internally, affect their environments, and self-replicate
- both can be represented and simulated with symbolic abstractions
- both are concepts which are abstractions of their subsystems
I could go on, but these characteristics are sufficient to qualify the claim that life and intelligence are analogs of a sort.
Is it therefore valid to consider any mechanism that takes any action a form of life?
The answer to the second question is no. A digital thermostat can take action by turning on and off a furnace according to a very sophisticated set of computations, but it is not alive because it lacks some of the other characteristics we ascribe to life including self-replication and growth.