1.1 What is AI?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the field of building computer systems that can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as understanding language, recognising images, making decisions, and solving problems. Instead of following only fixed step-by-step instructions, modern AI systems learn patterns from large amounts of data.

A simple everyday example is the autocomplete on your phone keyboard: as you type an Amharic or English message, it predicts the next word based on patterns it learned from millions of past messages. That prediction is a small piece of AI at work.