Artificial Intelligence, Real Concerns: Hype, Hope and the Hard Truth About AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is generating both interest and investment from companies hoping to leverage the power of autonomous, self-learning solutions. The Pentagon recently earmarked $2 billion in funding to help the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) push AI forward, and artificially intelligent solutions are dominating industry subsets such as medical imaging, where AI companies raised a combined $130 million worth of investments from March 2017 through June 2018. Information security deployments are also on the rise as IT teams leverage AI to defeat evolving attack methods, and recent data suggests that AI implementation could both boost gross domestic product (GDP) and generate new jobs. It's easy to see AI as a quick fix for everything from stagnating revenues to medical advancement to network protection. According to a recent survey from ESET, however, new increasing business expectations and misleading marketing terminology have generated significant hype around AI, to the point where 75 percent of IT decision-makers now see AI as the silver bullet for their security issues.