What Is Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Business and IT Glossary

Artificial intelligence (AI) extends the abilities of its human counterparts and can search, read, understand, and categorize various sets of unstructured data faster than any human or team can.

As a computer science discipline, AI traces its roots to the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, which brought together leading academic and industry researchers to attack a simply stated problem with a bold premise:

An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.

From the original research funding proposal by McCarthy (Dartmouth), Minsky (Harvard), Rochester (IBM), and Shannon (Bell Labs)