The future of AI apps will be delivery as a service

At first this may come as a disappointment to those who imagined a future of conversing with intelligent machines capable of completing a variety of tasks. But upon closer inspection, there's still plenty of potential value behind the more limited AI apps being developed today. Bowles said one of the chief benefits of today's AI apps is they will help businesses make sense of all the data they've been piling up since the early days of big data. AI systems will be able to quickly deliver insights from large data stores by using machine learning to pick out relevant information and natural language processing to write up human-readable reports, all in a matter of minutes. "It's mostly about helping people discover what's in the data," he said.