Reini Urban mentioned in comp.lang.lisp the following McKinsey Quarterly report: The Return of Artificial Intelligence (requires free registration; you can log in with the standard "cypherpunk" with password "cypherpunk").

I don't know if AI techniques are any more or less likely to succeed in business now than they were 20 years ago (McKinsey claims that it is more likely because of "the fact that the underlying Web-enabled infrastructure creates unprecedented scope for collecting massive amounts of information and for using it to automate business functions", which sounds reasonable for some domains, at least), but I do know a language that is great for "working with complex data in dynamic environments"...