Distinguishing among the 50 shades of artificial intelligence

It has been my experience that whenever a new craze appears in the field of information technology (IT), the industry begins to have varying levels of flirtation with the concept, and each firm's executives try to best other firms by jumping on the bandwagon and then proceeding to make wide-ranging pronouncements about how they are using the new craze to transform their industry. Just a few years ago, the craze was to have a global delivery centre in India, either through an outsourcing relationship with an IT service provider or by tapping directly into the technology labour pool in India. This was starkly obvious to me when we hosted more than one Western client at an industry or service provider event--the first metrics they gauged each other by while sizing up where each stood on the totem pole were usually: "number of people in India" and "number of trips taken to India". Today, this chatter has moved on to topics around automation, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL) and blockchain. The irony is that many of these disciplines are actually quite old, but they have only now become fashionable catchphrases.