Maybe you've heard this one: Guy walks into a bar, and the bartender says "What'll you have?" Without missing a beat, the guy says, "Based on the last ten people you served, you tell me!" OK, we may not be served by automated bartenders yet, but it doesn't seem too far-fetched if you believe the hype. AI, or artificial intelligence, is the solution du jour to just about everything these days, but the promise of business automation is still just a bit ahead of the proof: while almost 70% of high-performing companies are actively looking for ways to use AI, just over half (57%) have a "completely defined plan" to actually use and benefit from it. What are AI and its companion ML (machine learning)? Think of the pair as a way for a system to respond to a request (that's the AI part) and to improve that response over time based on the outcomes it "observes" (that's the ML part.)