Analyses of the Technological Accumulation over the 2nd and the 3rd AI Boom and the Issues Related to AI Adoption by Firms

Although AI was proposed by J. McCarthy back in 1956, 60 years later, we are beginning to witness a surge of interest in the practical applications of AI in many sectors. However, the actual adoption rate of AI in businesses has been quite low. The current 3rd AI boom follows the 2nd AI boom in the 1980s which focused mainly on expert systems. In this paper, an attempt is made to analyze the technological accumulation process from the 2
^nd
to the 3rd AI boom and to identify forthcoming key application areas. The methodology is based on a 3 step approach. In the first step, a bibliometric analyses of Artificial Intelligence was carried out to analyze the technological accumulation during the 2nd and the 3rd AI boom. Having done the desk work and interviewed several experts in AI, we decided that 2013 was the year which marked the boundary between the two AI booms. A bibliometric analyses based on countries and institutions over the 2 periods was followed by co-occurrence analyses of the author keywords in the 2 periods, before and after 2013. In the third stage, interviews were carried out with some corporate members to do a qualitative analysis on the possible application areas of AI and issues to be solved for adopting AI were identified. The results showed that in the 3rd AI boom, machine learning, deep learning, genetic algorithm have been identified as the key technologies. Furthermore, prediction, forecasting, data mining, fault diagnosis, pattern recognition were identified as important areas in the 3rd AI boom. It was also revealed that firms' R&D has been changing to focus more on AI applications.