Is Artificial Intelligence Over-Hyped?

Worldwide spending on cognitive and artificial intelligence (AI) systems is predicted to increase 59.3% year-over-year to reach $12.5 billion by the end of 2017, according to an International Data Corporation (IDC) spending guide. That number is forecast to almost quadruple by 2020, when spending on AI is predicted to reach more than $46 billion. If "personalization" was the marketing buzzword of 2016, then 2017 is the year of "artificial intelligence." As more cloud vendors tout their own AI systems, however, could AI be over-hyped? Joe Stanhope, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, says a cultural dissonance exists with AI, thanks to science fiction, and that many people have a preconceived notion about what artificial intelligence really is.