One of the biggest problems when reading about any kind of innovation in the press is the prevalent assumption that everyone understands the topic and how it works. Whether it’s cloud computing, edge computing, cold fusion, controlled fusion, or recently, artificial intelligence (AI), experts and reporters start extolling the technological miracle without offering even a simple explanation about what it is.

Articles about AI have been especially annoying, in part because of its name—AI is neither artificial nor intelligent—but also because it conjures up images of machines that think and reason, which is far from the reality.

When Jeff Dewar, CEO of Quality Digest, was at MasterControl’s Masters Summit 2022 in Salt Lake City, he had a chance to sit down with Viktoria Rojkova, MasterControl’s vice president of AI/ML and Data Science, and ask her to explain just what AI is. Her answers were clear, concise, and easy to understand.

Although the ultimate goal of AI is to create machines that perform tasks that would normally require human intelligence, first we must teach machines to learn. In other words, machine learning (ML) is used to achieve AI.

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