What is artificial intelligence (AI)?

https://www.databricks.com/blog/what-is-artificial-intelligence

Publish Date: 2026-06-18 14:10:00

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science that lets machines perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, like learning, reasoning, problem-solving, recognizing patterns and making decisions. Put more simply, AI is software that learns from data and uses what it learns to make predictions, decisions or new content without being explicitly programmed for each task.

Today’s AI runs everything from spam filters and recommendation engines to chatbots like ChatGPT and image generators. It draws on a range of techniques, most notably machine learning and generative AI, and it has moved from research labs into products people use every day.

Stanford computer scientist Fei-Fei Li, writing in the Stanford Emerging Technology Review, places AI in the same category as the most transformative technologies in modern history: “AI is a foundational technology that is advancing other scientific fields and, like electricity and the internet, has the potential to transform how society operates.” Adoption is now scaling across every sector, from healthcare and financial services to retail and manufacturing, and the pace is accelerating.

This page covers how AI works, the main types of AI, real-world examples, the limitations to watch for and a brief history of the field.

What is AI in simple words?

Think of AI as teaching a computer by example instead of writing step-by-step instructions. Show a system thousands of photos of cats and it learns to recognize cats on its own, not because someone told it that cats have whiskers and pointed ears, but because it has seen enough examples to figure out the pattern. AI is not “thinking” the way you or I do. It is finding patterns in data and using those patterns to make a best guess. That distinction matters: AI can get remarkably good results in narrow domains, but it does not understand anything in the human sense.

The same pattern-matching approach that lets a model recognize cats also lets it spot…

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