With apologies to author William Gibson, who originally pointed out that "the future is already here, it's just not very distributed," we can say that the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) is here, but that's just not so very evenly distributed either. That's because when it comes to AI, every industry has a different story to tell. Alas, the path to AI is not so straight and narrow.Photo: Joe McKendrick Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, for one, recently marveled at the thousands of different applications for AI emerging in different forms across all industries -- many of which are also linked to the Internet of Things. "Two of the most inspiring things that I've seen technologically over the past year are the developments in precision medicine and precision agriculture," he related to Mariya Yao in an interview published at FreeCodeCamp. "Precision agriculture, for instance, we are entering an era where this intelligent edge, like having these AI-capable devices everywhere including and being able to mount them in drones, is allowing you to gather more interesting data about agricultural operations," Scott says.