Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming. But Why Now?

This is the year artificial intelligence came into its own for mainstream businesses, at least as a marketing feature. On Sunday, Salesforce.com, which sells online software for sales and marketing, announced it would be adding A.I. to its products. Its system, called Einstein, promises to provide insights into what sales leads to follow and what products to make next. Salesforce chose this date to pre-empt Oracle, the world's largest business software company, which on Sunday evening began its annual customer event in San Francisco. Oracle calls its product Oracle A.I. Elsewhere, General Electric is pushing its A.I. business, called Predix.