Artificial Intelligence 101 -- Tech terms explained for non-tech folks

Artificial Intelligence has been one of the most used/abused buzzwords in the industry over the past few years. Typical conversations around AI would go like the cartoon below. So apart from it being a buzzword that everyone assumes they know about -- why is it so popular? To understand that let's try to understand what it actually means. According to Stanford Researcher, John McCarthy, "Artificial Intelligence is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. Artificial Intelligence is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable."