 In 1980 , an expert system called <unk> was completed at CMU for the Digital Equipment Corporation . It was an enormous success : it was saving the company 40 million dollars annually by 1986 . Corporations around the world began to develop and deploy expert systems and by 1985 they were spending over a billion dollars on AI , most of it to in @-@ house AI departments . An industry grew up to support them , including hardware companies like <unk> and <unk> Machines and software companies such as <unk> and <unk> . 
