When you’re evolved and you know it, be grateful. You’re alive, you’re healthy, you’re – hopefully – wealthy. Well, at least not poor. Compared to our ancestors and long-gone relatives, we’re pretty well off. We’ve conquered famine, disease and (almost) war. Life has never been so good for so many, worldwide.

Sure, we’ve got social and environmental problems, but even those are on the agenda and getting attention. What we don’t have is full scale world war, apocalypse and deprivation. The world operates on new rules, but it operates. Successfully. Thanks to AI.

Wait, what’s that? Yes, we owe it all to our robot overlords. And by robots, I’m not talking about mechanical humans. The real robots are the smart software systems, driven by deep learning algorithms and fed with massive amounts of data – real world data – that direct and, dare I say it, control our very lives. Because we want them to.

Whether it’s food, fashion, finance, or fun; or the freedom to choose, learn, travel or grow, business is all about adding value to people’s lives – that’s its ultimate purpose. Technology, the use of tools, is what drives productivity; and AI makes it exponential. Adding value exponentially; that’s a noble purpose for businesses that rely on smart systems.

Just think how impossible, or at the very least, dull and boring, our daily lives would be without our phones, which carry AI to the edge. Except for the few indigenous jungle holdouts and new-age offgridders, we’re all connected, and dependent on the smart data-driven systems in our daily lives. And businesses depend on them to keep supply chains flowing and markets operating efficiently. Granted, we’re giving up some privacy and possibly security, but there’s no technology that doesn’t carry some risk together with the rewards.

The bottom line: In today’s smart society you can’t be alive, truly alive – or in business – without AI.