After a trou­ble­some ado­les­cence dur­ing which arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) most­ly appeared in movie plots and pre­sen­ta­tions deliv­ered by so-called ​“futur­ists,” AI has final­ly come of age. It’s now start­ing to change the way both con­sumer- and enter­prise-focused prod­ucts perform.

Beyond the Robots

The real (non-Hol­ly­wood) AI has emerged because of faster pro­cess­ing speeds, improved (and cheap­er) stor­age, and our cur­rent approach to man­ag­ing Big Data. The sum of these forces has allowed us to start apply­ing AI to help all soft­ware sys­tems dri­ve the deci­sion-mak­ing process. The hope is that we’ll build up to a new lev­el of con­text-aware use cases.

The emer­gence of real-world AI comes from the com­bi­na­tion of all these fac­tors, plus a new approach to micro­proces­sor chipset engi­neer­ing where a degree of AI is hard-etched onto the cir­cuit boards pow­er­ing our machines. You can see why AI has become core to how we’re now able to make dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion happen.