If you have not heard of Artificial Intelligence (AI) before, you have come the right place and if you have heard of AI before you have also come to the right place as you will appreciate the banter and please do add your comments.

AI is defined as the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.

2016 has been a huge year in A.I.," said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy. "We've seen industry giants — like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM, Intel, and Nvidia — either make A.I. their company 'north star' or add and advance the craft with new offerings to democratize A.I."

One of my more learned and sceptical friends in the Silicon Valley who does not want to be named was not as optimistic. He quoted that “The problem with AI start-ups is that most of them do not have any intelligence. They are repackaging their old product under the AI umbrella to appease vulnerable Venture Capitalists. AI is the flavour of the season and if you add an AI element to your product it becomes sexy.”

I decided to investigate for myself where we really are in the world of AI. Here are some interesting facts. 

1.   Nearly 140 private companies working to advance artificial intelligence technologies have been acquired since 2011, with over 40 acquisitions taking place in 2016 alone. (Source: CB Insights)

2.   Forrester Research forecasts that AI products and services will generate $1.2 Trillion additional product revenues or in their own words steal the amount from industry peers who have less AI savvy products.

3.   Professor Stephen Hawkins has warned that the development of full artificial intelligence, could spell the end of the human race. 

4.   AI companies have broadly categorised their products under machine learning, robotics, IOT, deep learning, NLP platforms, predictive API’s, voice and speech recognition. This is not a comprehensive list. 

5.   Robots and computers have already started to replace jobs. However, an entire new industry craving human talent has been created to build these AI applications.

6.   Advances in computing hardware, software and telecommunication networks is pushing the adoption of AI applications.

It is for you to judge whether AI is an old wine in a new bottle. However, in my view AI or robots will not be completely replacing humans but will be assisting them. AI in simple words represents the next stage of advanced computing.