In 1980 , an expert system called XCON 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 was 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 Symbolics and Lisp Machines and software companies such as IntelliCorp and Aion .