In the previous installment, I explained mp3juice that because AI product designers of the past decade intentionally smoothed out the user experience (UX) to ensure that users wouldn’t notice when they interacted with AI components, it doesn’t make sense that users were the intended audience for all the buzz about AI back then (and there was a lot of buzz). All that AI talk wasn’t aimed at users or the general public.

Reading this, you’re in danger of thinking that AI buzz has its origins in the previous decade, so let’s wind the clock back another ten years. There was buzz in those days too. Except the audience was different. What kind of people would you have found nearest to the new millennium epicenter of AI excitement?

Two decades ago, most of the hollering in the AI space involved aspirational methodology — theory that hadn’t been put into practice yet — because two components were still missing: huge datasets and the computer hardware to process them. The rise of cloud computing in the last decade was the spark that blossomed into a whole industry of builders automating all kinds of marvelous things (for users to enjoy without noticing).