Book excerpt: Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the practice of medicine. It is helping doctors diagnose patients more accurately, predict treatment effects on individuals, and recommend better treatments. AI is also transforming the drug discovery and development process, helping pharmaceutical researchers to identify and design active drug candidates, and reducing the cost of the clinical testing phase. Recently, the FDA moved toward a new, tailored review framework for artificial intelligence-based medical devices (Gottlieb, April 2019).This book is intended for a broad readership: sufficiently straightforward for college freshmen and informative enough for researchers. Chapter 1 gives a gentle introduction to the five ML categories of learning: supervised, unsupervised, reinforcement, evolutionary and swarm intelligence. Chapters 2 through 6 discuss the key concepts of the main methods in each of the five AI categories and their applications in pharmaceutical research & development and healthcare. Chapter 7 provides a state-of-the-art review of AI applications in prescription drug discovery, development, pharmacovigilance, and healthcare. Chapter 8 discusses artificial general intelligence and its controversies, challenges, and likely future directions. A few equations are included to effectively deliver key concepts and 100 key references are cited to meet researchers' needs. The book is a simplified version of my previous book: Artificial Intelligence for Drug Development, Precision Medicine, and Healthcare. Readers who want to get hands on experiences may explore the book with computer code in R.