There are many important applications of artificial intelligence; problems that would otherwise be very hard or impossible to solve by traditional approaches. This includes image and speech recognition, translation engines, data analysis and prediction, etc. It also opens up many possibilities that could have huge impacts on our lives, for better or worse: autonomous drones; self-driving cars; computer vision algorithms that can detect faces, targets, and other objects; medical diagnosis; financial market analysis; etc. The sky is the limit when it comes to A.I. applications, and you bet companies will try their hardest to find innovative technologies that ease their lives and allow them to be as productive or even more productive without as many human workers. Plus, there are many things computers simply do better than humans such as number-crunching (i.e., data analysis, optimization), so there's no reason not to use A.I. in these domains.