AI washing muddies the artificial intelligence products market

When a technology is labelled AI, the vendor must provide information that makes it clear how AI is used as a differentiator and what problems it solves that can't be solved by other technologies, explained Jim Hare, a research VP at Gartner, who focuses on analytics and data science. "You have to go in with the assumption that it isn't AI, and the vendor has to prove otherwise," Hare said. "It's like the big data era -- where all the vendors say they have big data -- but on steroids." "What I'm seeing is that anything typically called machine learning is now being labelled AI, when in reality it is weak or narrow AI, and it solves a specific problem," he said. IT buyers must hold the vendor accountable for its claims by asking how it defines AI and requesting information about what's under the hood, Hare said.