"It is a renaissance, it is a golden age," Bezos told an audience at the Internet Association's annual gala last week.

Unfortunately, it has not helped solve that American problem of using the wrong word. For AI to be undergoing a renaissance it would have had to have been around before. The term was first coined in the 16th century and it means “revival”. Bezos should have asked his AI Alexa for the right word before saying it.

Bezos said that Amazon was now solving problems with machine learning and artificial intelligence that were in the realm of science fiction for the last several decades. “And natural language understanding, machine vision problems, it really is an amazing renaissance."

Bezos called AI an "enabling layer" that will "improve every business".

At Amazon, Bezos said that "cool" developments like Alexa and its Prime Air delivery drones use "tremendous amounts" of AI. But machine learning is being deployed across the company.

"I would say, a lot of the value that we're getting from machine learning is actually happening kind of beneath the surface. It is things like improved search results, improved product recommendations for customers, improved forecasting for inventory management, and literally hundreds of other things beneath the surface," Bezos said.

The Amazon CEO also said that the company is making AI techniques available to enterprise customers through its cloud division, Amazon Web Services.