I remember around the turn of the millennium, AOL had a new CEO who was committed to a bold, Quixotic cause: creating search for pictures (there still wasn’t enough bandwidth for extensive video sharing).

At the time, less than two decades ago, this was as bold an attempt as landing a man on the moon four decades earlier. How could you get a computer to understand what you mean by a tabby cat, much less get a picture of your tabby cat simply by searching?

As a matter of fact, it was so bold that within a year or two that CEO was replaced and the money sunk into that venture was redirected into more profitable and practical advances.

Now, we think nothing of searching for pictures or images. As a matter of fact, Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) subsidiary Google happily sends you customized photo albums of trips you’ve made, or allows you to search for videos by subject, title, and the people that are in them.

It’s not alone. MegaTrend perennials GOOGL, as well as Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and others, have built out massive cloud-based data farms and data visualization tools to do all sorts of marvelous things for companies and consumers alike.

GOOGL now has indexed more than 35 trillion web pages, and with its AI-powered search engine, that powers 2 trillion searches a year…and growing.

Cloud computing and its many offshoots that power features for retailers, like AMZN, is just a small piece of the power and potential of AI.

If you thought my numbers for AI’s near future were optimistic, then check out the above projections. They’re even more impressive.

Why is everyone so optimistic?

Smart Everything

The key reason is, we’ve all experienced “dumb” things throughout our lives. Dumb cars, dumb houses, dumb online shopping, dumb manufacturing.

That isn’t to say the people who are working these jobs are dumb. It means that we now know technologies that can enhance our work product, as well as our regular day-to-day experiences, whether analog or digital.

One concept that bears understanding is “embedded computing”. What it means is having computers in objects that have a primary value that isn’t computing.

A car for instance. It’s about getting you from point A to point B, but it can also help you parallel park. It can help you manage cruise control and lane movements in traffic, and it can even call ahead and set up an appointment in the shop before you even remember that your oil needs to be changed or your brake pads need replacing.

AI-driven embedded computing is everywhere.

As you can see above, all these industries are already involved in one way or another with AI solutions.

One reason AI has spread so quickly is chip makers, like MegaTrend favorites NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD), have been building blazing hot chips that can not only manage the data more quickly, but offer that data in a variety of ways so that businesses and consumers can derive value from them.

Just the Beginning

The fact is that AI is much broader than many people think. While no one has a monopoly on AI, it has massive implications in almost any industry you can think of.

Whether it’s managing robots on a shop floor, or helping visualize how a drug interacts with a protein, or generating new streaming content ideas for you, or helping you buy cryptocurrencies, AI is at play in far more places than you can imagine.

There are companies that understand what a powerful and disruptive force AI can be, and they’re enthusiastically deploying it in an effort to make our lives less stressful and richer.

This is the underlying core of all my MegaTrend stocks, and if you thought the last 20 years was a wild ride, get ready for the next 20 – and profit mightily from them.