AI Becomes Cognitive. Is it Now Ready for Sustained Value?

Is AI finally ready to roll?  Again? Spent years in the 90s working on it, with successes but also ultimately descent into a winter of discontent.  Back then there were a small number of well funded startups that drove the efforts. The last of these, Teknowledge, went away just a few years ago. I am currently reviewing some of the work done with them.

Now the players are the likes of IBM, Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon, which already have embedded AI technologies deep in their businesses. That's a good sign, they are selling practical information technology, not the promise of disembodied intelligence.  Now can they get non technology companies, like Procter & Gamble, to pay attention?  Or do the AI, now cognitive, solutions need to remain deeply buried in the code?  Formulated in an algorithm?

And it is still hard to track how much progress is being made, and what that progress looks like.  CWorld covers some of the old efforts, and the new.  Tries to make sense of it all. I am along for the ride for now will report on it here.