Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images For a couple of years, the main problem AI firms had was convincing people — or, more specifically, people in charge of companies — to pay for their products. Artificial-intelligence applications were gaining popularity, but they were expensive and not yet easy to deploy in clearly and measurably productive ways. Lots of companies wanted to use AI, insofar as they understood it as a theoretical source of efficiency and a tech megatrend that