A working professional today has access to AI tools that, five years ago, did not exist in any usable form. The tools that did exist could not reliably draft a document, analyse a contract, summarise a complex report, or hold a structured conversation about professional work. The AI tools a practitioner uses today can do all of those things, with quality good enough that firms are reorganising how they produce work to incorporate them.
Something happened between then and now. This module explains what that something was, because the professional who understands what changed will understand both why AI is suddenly useful and why the specific tools they are using work the way they do. That understanding shapes how they will use these tools, what they will trust the tools to do, and what they will keep for themselves.
The argument of this module is straightforward. AI has existed as a research field for seventy years and has produced three distinct waves of technology. The first two waves hit serious limits and left AI useful only for narrow, specialised applications. The third wave, which began in 2017, produced a category of system that works for general knowledge work for the first time in the field's history. The tools the professional is now being asked to work with are products of that third wave. Understanding why the third wave works where the first two did not is the foundation on which the rest of this programme rests.