In our Briefing last year (IF 3712) on Artificial Intelligence, we noted that applications of AI were coming with surprising speed. Notably, in 2014, computer scientists thought it would take 10 years to develop an AI that could beat world-champion players of Go — a game exponentially more complicated than chess; yet such a program was written in just two years. Beating professional poker players was seen as another distant achievement — after all, poker requires a certain level of human intuition to understand “bluffing.” And yet, earlier this year, an AI developed at Carnegie Mellon University was able to beat professional poker players during a 20-day tournament. In particular, the software was able to assess its previous performance and revise itself during the course of the tournament. AI is improving quickly, and its applications are not all fun and games, either. This inFocus will explore how AI is not only affecting the tech sector, but is also rapidly affecting industries such as retail, financial services, healthcare, defense and others.