The AAAI-86 Conference Exhibits: New Directions for Commercial Artificial Intelligence

The annual conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is the premier U.S. gathering for artificial intelligence (AI) theoreticians and practitioners. On the commercial side, AAAI is the only event with a comprehensive exhibition that includes most significant U.S. vendors of AI products and services. In 1986 some 5100 people attended AAAI-a very good showing considering that the 1985 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) drew about the same number of people even with its substantial international support. The commercial exhibits at AAAI-86 (110 exhibitors; 80,000 square feet) gave us the opportunity to take a snapshot of an industry in transition. What I saw was a dramatic increase in the commercialization of AI technology and a decrease in the mystique, smoke, and hype. A preliminary tour of the AAAI-86 exhibits indicated that participants could expect substantial changes from the situation at IJCAI85. At the 1985 conference, many vendors showed off their AI software and hardware products through demonstrations of simple application prototypes and games. At AAAI-86, however, product demonstrations showed real applications. Some vendors, including Intellicorp and Teknowledge, held private application forums, giving visitors a look at a variety of successful applications developed with their tools. To match the new realism of the vendor exhibits, a new kind of user visited these exhibits. According to several exhibitors, the 1985 conference attendee was a corporate staffer, a person looking for tools to build prototypes that would demonstrate the value of AI technology. The 1986, user was interested in building operational systems that bring a return on an investment. The bottom line is clear: Corporate America has been sold on AI and now expects to use and benefit from the technology. Various AI market watchers have estimated the percentage of Fortune 500 firms making significant investments