Andreesen Horowitze has prepared a chapter 0 for an Artificial Intelligence Primer - for business leaders, data scienctists and software developers to assess business potential for AI.
The summary comes from: http://aiplaybook.a16z.com/docs/intro/getting-started Original source code and material has been prepared by: Diego Doval, Delip Rao, Mark Palatucci, Sonal Chokshi and Michael Wee.
Artificial intelligence is a broad set of software capabilities that make your software smarter. It's going to have as broad an impact on software as relational database technologies, which have been a foundation addition since the 1970's.
AI can be seen to make predictions cheap: https://hbr.org/2016/11/the-simple-economics-of-machine-intelligence but can provide a lot more: We're seeing the impact of refining software processes to learn from past operations - like a feedback loop / Kalman filter. Essentially creating systems that are as good or even better at tasks than humans.