As an executive, I constantly receive pitches from companies urging me to take advantage of the latest technology. The pitches are largely the same: I must implement or deploy the technology now or risk losing any advantage over my more forward-thinking competitors, who are lining up with their checkbooks open. Of course, the technology they're urging me to deploy often comes with a steep price point and implementation and learning curves that only prolong the process. These pitches are almost always filled with "buzzcronyms": ROI and TCO for the marketing folks, and ACID, JSON, MDM and YARN for those more technically minded (my favorite is the electronic interface for enterprise integration and optimization -- you know, EIEIO). Given that artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI and ML, for those who can't get enough of acronyms) are among the hottest topics these days, it should come as no surprise that a significant percentage of marketing outreach involves these technologies.