Machine learning and AI have gradually moved from theoretical discussion to a real-life, everyday business application. But this increasingly ubiquitous technology goes by many names, and businesses must be careful to select performance over hype. Artificial intelligence has leapt from the pages of popular sci-fi novels and screenplays and into our everyday lives. Consider, for instance, the software I'm using to transcribe this paragraph as I dictate it out loud -- it's a simple enough task for a human, but one that requires some extraordinary computation for this technology. A natural language processor must categorize complex audio data as either useful or irrelevant, analyze it with probabilistic reasoning, and synthesize the result: in this case, the words you're currently reading.