Making the business case for AI and ML

The field of AI has seen a significant rise in popularity in the past decade or two. Still, it is often considered by many as a purely academic and scientific subject. The reason for this may be due to the AI effect, a phenomenon in which feats of AI often get removed from the definition of AI once they become a routine technology. What was once considered an impressive achievement and a demonstration of artificially intelligent behavior becomes a normal machine task and is no longer thought of as AI.

For example, optical character recognition (OCR) is a technology so pervasive now that it is not thought of as an AI application as often as it used to be. The AI effect sometimes misleads businesses into thinking that AI belongs to the realm of research and it's not something worth investing too heavily in. But that couldn't be further from the truth. Beyond leveraging existing AI technologies – whether we think of them as AI...