Artificial Intelligence: An Overview 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been defined as science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs as defined by John McCarthy, Father of Artificial Intelligence.AI is the technology that tries to emulate human performance by learning, coming to its own conclusions and enhancing human cognitive performance as mentioned by Gartner. Machine learning, Robotics and Artificial neural networks are branches of Artificial intelligence. Artificial Intelligence is not a new term, its origin can be traced back to 1956, when this term was coined in Darthmouth conference, that time AI was an academic discipline. Since then its development went through various phases, in 1997 IBM’s DeepBlue beated Kasparov, world champion in chess. In 2002, Amazon used AI for giving automated recommendations. 

Artificial Intelligence is going to have deep impact on business, impacting life of every one from all the possible angles. It will change the way we live and work. AI is currently being used in various sectors like agriculture, education, health, logistics, entertainment media, manufacturing industry, construction industry to name few. For example, HR people are using it for recruitment, selection and training, Sales function uses it for customer care queries and suggestions, Finance function is using it for finding risk in investments, production is using for making production easy , fast and accurate.

Top five companies for developing AI are IBM, Microsoft, Toshiba, Samsung and NEC. IBM has about 8000 patents and Microsoft has about 6000 patents under their names. Out of 20 organizations publishing AI documents 10 are in China, 6 in US, 2 in Singapore and one each in Japan and France. India is ranked 5th in case of citable documents in artificial intelligence (2010- 2016) with 13,948 documents. 

So, Artificial intelligence will radically change the way we do business and the way we live. Human will have competition from machines. Business organizations to be successful must be ready to learn, unlearn and relearn. Importance and implications of Artificial Intelligence were also discussed at RBMI, Bareilly. 

DR. PANKAJ AGRAWAL (PROFESSOR, RBMI-BAREILLY)