Short answer
Artificial intelligence (AI) is technology that lets computer systems do tasks that normally require human thinking: understanding text, recognising images, making forecasts and simple decisions. The most common kind today is generative AI, such as ChatGPT, which writes text and answers questions.
What AI can and cannot do
Artificial intelligence is not a “thinking machine” from the movies. It is software that has learned to recognise patterns from large amounts of data. That is why it is good at:
- understanding and writing text — e-mails, summaries, replies to customers;
- reading documents — invoices, contracts, applications;
- sorting and classifying — for example, which department an incoming e-mail belongs to;
- forecasting — demand, risks, anomalies.
AI is not perfect: it can make mistakes and confidently “make up” facts. That is why in a business AI works best together with checks and human approval for important decisions. More on this — why AI sometimes gets things wrong.
AI, machine learning, language models — what’s the difference?
AI is the umbrella term (in Latvian you will also see MI, short for mākslīgais intelekts — it means the same thing). Machine learning is the way AI systems learn from data, and large language models are the technology behind ChatGPT and similar tools.
What it means for a business
For a business, AI is a tool, not a goal. The value appears when AI is built into a specific process — for example, invoice processing or sorting customer requests — and saves employees time every day.