The term artificial intelligence was first used in a 1955 proposal for a study submitted by John McCarthy of Dartmouth College, Marvin Minsky of Harvard University, Nathaniel Rochester at IBM, and Claude Shannon at Bell Telephone Laboratories. This happened before I was born. I find it kind of nuts that AI was discussed long before we had the computing and storage power needed to make it work.
As a decision support analyst fresh out of college, I built early AI systems that were too expensive to operate, so they were only used in specialized circumstances. It was a niche technology. Because of its high operating costs, AI fell in popularity from the early 1980s until about five to seven years ago. Now, cloud computing’s on-demand consumption model and much better AI technology have substantially lowered the operating costs, and AI is back in focus for enterprise IT.
