While it seems unlikely that AI will enter another nuclear winter, the current COVID-19 situation is giving enterprises the opportunity to rethink their AI strategies, giving the better AI projects more room to run, while discarding the borderline AI projects that were unlikely to pay off. The macro economic situation deteriorated rapidly thanks to COVID-19. In the span of a few weeks in late March, the United States went from record-low unemployment and widespread prosperity to massive layoffs and the abrupt end of the longest economic expansion in history. Amid this brutal economic toll, many companies have declared bankruptcy, while others are slashing their budgets in an attempt to weather viral the storm. Will AI projects survive the mess? Companies that have already implemented AI have reported fewer impacts and a greater ability to respond to unanticipated disruptions to their businesses.

TechRepublic's Karen Roby talks with an AI expert who believes we need to rethink our approach and focus more on cost benefit tradeoffs and resourcing. The following is an edited transcript of the interview. We're talking with Arijit Sengupta, he's an AI expert with over 20 years of education and experience working in artificial intelligence and even wrote a book called AI is a Waste Of Money. So Arijit, you obviously think we need to re-evaluate our approach to AI… explain! Arijit Sengupta: The answer is to go back to the fundamentals.