The document discusses artificial neural networks (ANNs). It provides an overview of ANNs, including their biological inspiration from neurons in the brain, their composition of interconnected processing elements called neurons, and how they are configured for applications like pattern recognition. The document also covers different types of ANNs, their computational power, capacity for learning, convergence abilities, and use for generalization. Examples are given of ANN applications in various business domains like marketing, sales forecasting, finance, insurance, and telecommunications. Risks of ANNs discussed include needing a large and diverse training set, overfitting data, and high hardware resource requirements. A hybrid symbolic-neural network approach is also mentioned.