Artificial Intelligence has long been a popular topic for fiction and speculative essays, but it also has broad potential applications in the future of innovation with regard to products and services.

The day is coming, for example, when your coffee maker -- without being programmed -- will brew a fresh pot before you go to work. You might even see Amazon recommend products that don't exist until you buy them.

Software has come a long way since the personal computer revolution of the 1980s, and AI is driving software toward a more integrated future. Software equipped with artificial intelligence is being used by more and more companies, largely because it has the ability to collect and analyze data faster and more accurately than a human.