With the advances in computational technology, artificial intelligence (AI) systems have been growing exponentially and promise to become tools that are able to overcome some of the most difficult issues of medical research and patient care. Current progress in AI systems offers significant advantages in healthcare, with the potential to minimize the gap between data, knowledge and patient care. The purpose of this chapter is to examine how AI methods might affect data analysis in biomedicine and more specifically in anaesthesia. By the time this book has been published, the anaesthesia and critical care literature will be abound with manuscripts that use AI methods. It will therefore become crucial for the clinician to understand what AI is all about. A detailed understanding of AI requires an extensive knowledge of computational science and complex mathematical concepts. This chapter will provide the reader with the main insights needed to understand the basic concepts of the underlying modelling framework used by AI and will briefly review the different AI methods, their applications and limitations.