Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are designed to think and act like humans. The term "intelligence" encompasses reasoning, learning, problem-solving, perception, and language understanding among other cognitive functions. AI systems can be categorized as either weak or strong; however, most current applications fall into the former category known as narrow AI because they are designed to perform a specific task such as voice recognition or image analysis with high efficiency but do not possess general intelligence like humans.

The development of AI has been driven by advancements in machine learning (ML), which is an application of statistics and computer science that uses algorithms to parse data, learn from it, and then make a determination based on the data. Machine Learning can be further divided into supervised learning where models are trained using labeled datasets; unsupervised learning for finding hidden patterns or intrinsic structures in input data without pre-existing labels; semi-supervised learning which uses both labeled and unlabeled data to improve accuracy of results, while reinforcement learning involves training algorithms through a system of rewards and punishments.

AI has numerous applications across various industries including healthcare for disease diagnosis, finance for fraud detection, transportation with self-driving cars, customer service in the form of chatbots or virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa