What does AI actually mean and how does it work?

More and more every day, we hear about this new technology called Artificial Intelligence. This is not about to end! AI is spreading to many industries, but do we really know what “AI” means and how it works? It has been reported that the majority of people know what it stands for but don’t know how it works or what it does.

Firstly, AI means artificial intelligence, according to the Oxford dictionary; “AI is the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision making”. To keep it simple, this technology has the ability to do things that would require the intelligence of human and to work, this tool needs data.

There are a lot of terms which are associated with AI that can be very complex. They include:

Machine Learning often confused with artificial intelligence itself, but this is one of the capabilities of this technology gives to AI, is the ability to reproduce previous experience or to improve from experience. With machine learning, AI learns how to respond thanks to historical data and algorithms.

Big data and data mining are also two components of the complex AI technology, so these terms design the large amount of data that AI needs but also its ability to make this data meaningful and useful.

Data science means that AI used scientific methods, processes, and algorithms to extract knowledge and insights from data. With data science, it enables you to communicate and to explain a complex idea.

Let’s take a few examples of AI in your daily life:

When you used a search engine like Google, it is able to give you the closest possible results of your research, thanks to AI.

Every time you received an email to thank you for your visit on a website or for your purchase, there is automatically a marketing email sent and AI can determine which email must be sent based on how you have interacted with a business.

AI is also running online ads and deciding who can see this ad according to their particular behaviour and interests.

There is plenty of examples of the presence of AI in our daily life, and without knowing it, you are already learning to live in collaboration with this technology which save us time and make us more productive.