The today's sophisticated hardware is more and more in need of automated control. While the plugs for this type of control are available for decades already, programming behaviour itself is - generally speaking - not a trivial task.
Therefore, there is a great need for machines which are able to make inferences and make intelligent choices in an autonomous manner. Imagine for instance that the user wakes up at 7 AM, has breakfast and at about 8:20 heads towards work using their car. He/she does this every day from Monday to Friday except for vacation days and maybe public holidays.