Artificial intelligence in business: The state of play and future prospects ZDNet

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has often been popularly envisaged in super-smart humanoid robot form. In fact, it's more commonly implemented as behind-the-scenes algorithms that can process'big' data to accomplish a range of relatively mundane tasks far more efficiently than humans can. Few of us, yet, interact with bipedal robots or take a ride in a driverless car, but our daily lives are increasingly affected by AI systems that can recognise speech or images, or analyse patterns of online behaviour (to detect credit card fraud or serve up appropriate adverts, for example). Nor is it any surprise to find AI and automation featuring prominently on analyst firm Gartner's 2015 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, which places autonomous vehicles, for example, right at the hype-driven'Peak of Inflated Expectations': Gartner also identifies'Autonomous' as the sixth and final stage of an organisation's journey to becoming a'digital business', highlighting a range of emerging technologies as particularly relevant: Autonomous Vehicles, Bioacoustic Sensing, Biochips, Brain-Computer Interface, Digital Dexterity, Human Augmentation, Machine Learning, Neurobusiness, People-Literate Technology, Quantum Computing, Smart Advisors, Smart Dust, Smart Robots, Virtual Personal Assistants, Virtual Reality, and Volumetric and Holographic Displays. What follows hype, of course, is disillusionment: this has happened to AI before, and it's unlikely that all of the technologies flagged up in Gartner's Hype Cycle will make it to the mainstream.