Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. Specific applications of AI include expert systems, natural language processing, speech recognition and machine vision.

As the hype around AI has accelerated, vendors have been scrambling to promote how their products and services use AI. Often what they refer to as AI is simply one component of AI, such as machine learning. AI requires a foundation of specialized hardware and software for writing and training machine learning algorithms. No one programming language is synonymous with AI, but a few, including Python, R and Java, are popular.

• Reasoning processes - This aspect of AI programming focuses on choosing the right algorithm to reach a desired outcome.
• Self-correction processes - This aspect of AI programming is designed to continually fine-tune algorithms and ensure they provide the most accurate results possible.
• Learning processes - This aspect of AI programming focuses on acquiring data and creating rules for how to turn the data into actionable information. The rules, which are called algorithms, provide computing devices with step-by-step instructions for how to complete a specific task.

While AI tools present a range of new functionality for businesses, the use of artificial intelligence also raises ethical questions because, for better or worse, an AI system will reinforce what it has already learned. This can be problematic because machine learning algorithms, which underpin many of the most advanced AI tools, are only as smart as the data they are given in training. Because a human being selects what data is used to train an AI program, the potential for machine learning bias is inherent and must be monitored closely.