A.I. use is still rising globally, but most firms' tech isn't yet close to 'real' intelligence

Businesses are expected to spend as much as $97.9 billion annually on AI projects by 2023, up from just $37.5 billion this year, IDC forecasts. But there's still some debate about what qualifies as true AI. When China's state-run Xinhua News Agency last year announced that it had created the "world's first" AI news anchor, some in the industry balked. The digital anchor was built to move and speak as a normal anchor would, but its underlying technology leaned closer to machine learning than true artificial intelligence. Perhaps the simplest definition of what constitutes AI came from one of the founders of the discipline, Stanford University Professor John McCarthy, who died in 2011.