It turns out AI was not about to cure cancer. There was no shortage of hyperbole when IBM’s Watson AI beat the best humans at Jeopardy, but IBM has been unable to create a viable business from their AI prowess. Now their AI-powered health department is for sale if anybody wants a slightly used AI with one careful owner.
AI has proven its worth in many places, also in healthcare. But they have been narrow, well-defined areas like examining X-rays or flagging possibly fraudulent insurance claims. Just throwing a bunch of data scientists and an AI at a problem does not work.
If you have AI projects like Watson that has not delivered the results they promised, you can re-scope them try to harvest some value from solving a smaller and more well-defined problem. Or you can shut them down. The age of unquestioned spending on AI is over.