AI buzzword dictionary
What is Artificial intelligence (AI)?
Computer systems that perform tasks we normally associate with human thinking, such as recognising speech, sorting images or writing text.
What this actually means
AI is an umbrella term, not a single technology. It covers everything from the spam filter in your email to chat assistants that write whole paragraphs.
Most AI you meet today does not 'understand' things the way a person does. It finds patterns in large amounts of data and uses them to make predictions: which email is spam, which word comes next, which face matches a photo.
Example
Your phone's photo app groups pictures of the same person together. Nobody labelled every photo; a model learned which facial features tend to belong to the same face.
Where you may meet it
Search engines, sat-nav route planning, bank fraud alerts, voice assistants, customer-service chat, translation apps and writing tools.
Last reviewed: 25 September 2026