There can no longer be any doubt that artificial intelligence (AI) is the next frontier for the digital economy. While it may not have fully penetrated the public consciousness yet, AI is already working behind the scenes to enhance a wide variety of systems and services, fueling everything from chatbots to full-stack IT automation.
Much of this progress, however, has been driven by the rapid expansion of computing power, not the technologies that are intrinsic to AI. Functionally, AI consists of statistical data analysis using the same basic mathematical models developed in the 1990s and early 2000s. Even futuristic-sounding developments like artificial neural networking, which implies a process that mimics the neurons in the brain, is nothing more than sequential matrix multiplication -- in other words, fairly basic math but scaled to a high degree.