Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the field of computer systems that perform tasks normally associated with human cognition: perception, reasoning, language understanding, and decision-making.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial Intelligence is an umbrella term covering symbolic systems, statistical machine learning, deep learning, and modern foundation models. In enterprise contexts, AI usually refers to software that ingests data, learns patterns from it, and produces predictions, classifications, or generated content. The field includes narrow AI, which is specialised for one task (fraud detection, document extraction, voice transcription), and the broader research goal of general intelligence, which is not commercially deployed today. Most enterprise AI in production in 2026 is narrow, supervised, and tightly scoped to a specific business workflow.
How does Artificial Intelligence apply to enterprise AI?
Enterprises adopt AI to automate document review, support handling, decision triage, and process orchestration. The legal frame is set by the EU AI Act, GDPR for data subjects, and sector rules like DORA in finance or EIOPA guidance in insurance. Buyers should distinguish AI as a product feature from AI as a custom-built system tied to their data and workflows.
Related terms
- Machine Learning - Machine Learning (ML) is a subfield of AI in which systems learn statistical patterns from data rather than being explicitly programmed with rules.
- Deep Learning - Deep Learning is a branch of machine learning that uses multi-layer neural networks to learn hierarchical representations from raw data.
- Generative AI - Generative AI is the class of AI systems that produce new content (text, images, audio, video, code) rather than only classifying or scoring existing inputs.
- Enterprise AI - Enterprise AI is AI deployed inside a large organisation, integrated with systems of record, governed by enterprise risk and compliance, and accountable to multiple stakeholders.
External references
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