We're witnessing the dawn of AI technology right now, and it's being integrated into various parts of our lives in ways we couldn't have imagined. It's true that AI was being used in some capacity in things like self-driving cars, voice assistants, and chatbots, but it wasn't as prevalent as today. It's one thing to have dedicated services like AI image generators. Still, it's completely different to have AI integrated directly into the products and services we use every day, like web browsers, many of which you may never have expected to become a reality.

4 AI in Adobe Acrobat

Yes, even a PDF reader has AI now

Adobe has added AI to many of its popular services, but its most recent AI implementation comes in the form of an AI Assistant for Acrobat. Yes, even the popular PDF reader, which we have been using for years, now has an AI Assistant. It's one of those integration that I never saw coming, and I bet you didn't either.

You are essentially getting a chatbot in Acrobat, which you can invoke at any time and ask to highlight important details within a document, summarize long documents, and more. Adobe says you can even ask questions related to the content within a particular document, and the chatbot will do its best to find the answer and relay it back to you.

As much as I would love to try the AI Assistant in Acrobat and tell you whether it is even worth using, I can't fully test its capabilities just yet as it's only in beta and has yet to fully roll out for all users. A PDF reader is perhaps the last place I would've expected to see AI, yet here we are. It's not the most bizarre AI implementation, but it remains to be seen how it improves over time to offer a good experience for users.

3 Web browsers, a.k.a. AI browsers

AI is after your web browsing, too

Web browsers have been in existence as a portal to the web for many years now, and I don't think any of us were expecting — let alone yearning for — AI integration. Yet many popular web browsers today have AI built into them, helping you translate texts, summarize content from the webpage being viewed, and more.

There's no shortage of web browsers with AI integration on the market, and almost everything from Microsoft's Edge, Opera, Brave, etc., offer AI capabilities in some capacity. Not all of them are worth using, though, and many of them are fairly basic and don't do enough to warrant your attention. For instance, Opera's Aria web browser can't even read the web page you are currently viewing to summarize. Instead, you must copy its content to get a summary. The rest of its features don't particularly stand out either, and the same can be said for various other browsers, too.

2 MSI's new gaming monitor has AI

Is it borderline cheating?

We saw a great lineup of QD-LED monitors at CES 2024, but the one that particularly stood out to me — and most gamers — was the MSI MEG 321URX QD-OLED monitor. Besides its horribly long name, what surprised me about this monitor is its AI integration, which can be called borderline cheating, in my opinion.

This particular monitor comes with what MSI called the 'AI SkySight,' which is essentially a fancy name for a bizarre feature that can scan your mini-map in League of Legends to instantly detect enemies and show their direction in the HUD with a skull marker. I don't know about you, but that sounds borderline illegal, at least when you look at it from a competitive standpoint. Notably, the company has also added a 'Spectrum Bar,' which will project your in-game health onto the lightbar across the bottom of the display.

MSI further added that it can deliver these trained AI models to your monitor via firmware updates, so you can leverage its gaming intelligence feature to gain a competitive advantage in your preferred games. MSI doesn't seem to have any details of this particular monitor on its website yet, but just the fact that it was able to demo something like this makes me wonder how our gaming peripherals could shape the future of gaming.

1 Search engines with AI

AI-generated results are here to stay

You may have noticed that your favorite search engines, like Google and Bing, have added AI-generated results. None of us expected these search engines to change the way they have in a short duration, so this is definitely worth adding to the list, in my opinion. They're all slowly becoming conversational chatbots that do the heavy lifting for you by reading all the web pages and spitting out results that are easy to read and consume.

This AI integration in search engines is slowly changing how we find things online. It's only a matter of time until these search engines evolve into something that browses the internet for you instead of giving you results of pages to browse. On top of that, we also have chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot that are trained on vast swathes of internet data that can deliver results that are easy to consume.

It's getting hard to ignore AI

I can list a dozen other programs and services in which we never expected to see AI, that too without adding Microsoft's incessant Copilot push into the mix. Truthfully, you can't go more than a few hours without hearing someone talk about AI or reading some bizarre news on which app has implemented AI. I am not a huge fan of this phenomenon, particularly because many of these integrations don't use AI in a meaningful way to help or improve your experience.

Almost all instances of AI integration I've highlighted above feel like forced integration, at least in their current state. I am excited about the future that celebrates AI, but I can't say I am enjoying the ride to that future. My AI fatigue is already beginning to show, and I am afraid this is only the beginning.