Calculating where artificial intelligence can do business

Some recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, though striking, can seem of mainly theoretical interest. It is one thing to generate impressive results in a research setting, quite another to apply them in practice. For many businesses, the reality of machine learning has not lived up to the theory. Preparing and cleaning the data, training the models, generating consistent, usable results: all are often harder than they are made out to be. But the AI era also has the power to surprise, and the advances can come in unpredictable leaps.