What AI is (and what it is not)?
Wolfgang Messner · 2026
If you ask ten executives what “artificial intelligence” means, you are likely to get ten different answers—and none of them will be entirely wrong. That is precisely the problem. AI has become a convenient shorthand for almost anything that sounds advanced, automated, or futuristic. 1 Used in strategy decks, earnings calls, vendor pitches, and policy debates, the result is a powerful term rhetorically but weak analytically. Artificial intelligence (AI) has become one of the most abused terms in modern business language.