Making sense of artificial intelligence

When new trends and technologies burst onto the marketing scene, there's always a frantic effort to either keep up or provide guidance, especially when serious amounts of money are involved. It happened with social media, it happened with personalisation and big data, and it's happening now with artificial intelligence. We're approaching the top of the hype cycle where, like teenage sex, everyone is talking about it but very few are actually doing it. Conditions are perfect for the snake oil salesmen to move in. But there's real substance behind some of work being done in this field, and in this post I'll try to navigate through the fog of rhetoric to understand what's required to make the most of the significant opportunities.