Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence – perceiving, synthesizing and infering information – demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. OED (OUP) defines artificial intelligence as the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.

Several important sub-fields of AI research (as opposed to AI itself) have used working definitions of the intelligent agents field of study, which refers to any system that perceives its environment using an AI-component and takes actions (using procedural / hard-coded components) that maximize its chance of achieving its goals.^[a] While intelligent agents as systems that use artificial intelligence are an important application of AI, many AI systems do not perform any procedural (hard-coded) steps with the outputs of the AI at all, such as computer vision, speech recognition, or recommender systems