Artificial Intelligence (AI) is software that can perform tasks that usually need human-like understanding or reasoning — e.g. answering questions, summarizing text, or generating code. It differs from traditional programming: instead of you writing every rule (if X then Y), the system learns patterns from data and generalizes to new inputs it wasn’t explicitly programmed for. So you can ask "Summarize this contract" in natural language and get an answer without coding a summarizer by hand.
Traditional programming
Rules and logic are written by hand. Input → fixed code → output. Same input always gives same output.
AI / machine learning
The model learns patterns from data. Input → learned parameters → output. Can generalize to new inputs it wasn’t explicitly programmed for.
Example: Traditional vs AI
Traditional: A calculator app — you coded every operation (add, multiply). Same inputs always give the same output. AI: A chatbot — you didn’t code answers; the model learned from huge amounts of text. You give it a new question and it generates an answer; the same question can get different answers (e.g. with temperature).
Why it matters for you